A
villanelle (or occasionally villonelle) is a poem of nineteen lines, named for the French poet
Francois Villon (
1431-
1474). It consists of five stanzas of three lines each (rhyme scheme A B A) with a quatrain (A B A A) at the end. In addition to the rhyme scheme, the first and third lines alternately recur throughout, and are repeated as the last two lines of the quatrain (see
/Example).
Originally a French poetic form, it is not easily adaptable to English (a notable exception being Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night".)
All Wikipedia text
is available under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License