The Villanelle Once described by an anthology as, “exquisite torture wrapped in nineteen lines,” the villanelle is maddening to write, but swelling and intense if executed correctly. A villanelle contains a total of nineteen lines, with five tercets and a single concluding quatrain. The poem contains only two end rhymes. It also repeats the first and third lines, which appear together only in the first and last stanzas. The first line is repeated in the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth lines, and the third is repeated in the ninth, fifteenth, and nineteenth lines. Though the villanelle consists of a rather rigid structure, it began as a poetic form without any particular pattern. The word ‘villanelle’ actually comes from villano, the Italian word for ‘peasant.’ Originally, villanelles were simple Spanish and Italian song-dance poems consisting of rustic and pastoral themes that were performed by Renaissance troubadours. (Holman and Snyder.) The modern villanelle was popularized by nineteenth century author Theodore de Banville. (Douma.) Many poets through the ages became transfixed with the villanelle. Among these are Dylan Thomas, Edward Arlington Robinson, Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop. Perhaps the most famous villanelle is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Each poet writes the villanelle with an individual flavor. For instance, though the majority of villanelles make use of iambic pentameter,