villanelle
Americannoun
noun
Etymology
Origin of villanelle
1580–90; < French < Italian; see villanella, -elle
Explanation
A villanelle is a 19-line poem with a fixed form, including two repeated rhymes and two refrains. If you memorize a villanelle and recite it in class, your English teacher will be very impressed! The villanelle got its start as a poetic ballad influenced by a rustic Italian song called a villanella. Though the form has evolved, it still includes song-like refrains, giving the poem a musical sound. A villanelle has five stanzas of tercets, or three lines, and one quatrain (four lines). One of the most well-known villanelles in English is Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night."
Vocabulary lists containing villanelle
Literary Terms, Part I
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The Bell Jar
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Form & Symbolism and Allusion
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The confines of a structure make your brain work in a different way: How do I get this idea across in a sonnet or a villanelle?
From Los Angeles Times • May 11, 2026
In “Missing Dates,” a haunting villanelle about helpless love and despair, William Empson writes: “Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills./ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”
From Washington Post • Mar. 10, 2020
But it’s also, low-key, a villanelle, a rhymed 19-line form with two lines that repeat identically in different places throughout the poem and come together to form its closing couplet.
From Slate • Aug. 8, 2019
She’d fought to master the loss, writing seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque.
From The New Yorker • Feb. 26, 2017
“Mine have poetic meter. A villanelle, actually,” Beowulf added modestly.
From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
