I found this old villanelle poem from college recently. Poetry was never my forte, and I remember struggling in this class. I really liked the alternating rhyming pattern, however, and remember sitting in my room with a pen and paper trying to find a set of words that would fit. That had to be the hardest part of this style. It was easy to find words that rhymed, but another thing to find words that both rhymed and fit the theme of the poem.  

A villanelle is composed of five tercets, or stanzas of three lines each, with a terminal quatrain (stanza with four lines). The rhyme scheme is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeating in an alternating pattern.

It’s that time to gather around
when the house smells of basil and thyme.
Your hand can always be found

pointing the way; that sauce is too browned,
check the turkey before the chime
of five when we all gather around

the table with china and cloth like a gown.
Its everyone’s favorite season, favorite time
when your hand can be found

in every one of ours, forever bound.
There’s the timer telling us to dine,
that it’s time to finally gather around.

Bring the children, shoo the hounds
and then we all bow our heads, hands a mime
of where your hands can always be found.

As the years now pass, we all miss the sound
of your voice just passed its prime
telling us that it’s time to all gather around.
Your hand can no longer be found.

I’ve been looking into the villanelle form after finding this old copy. It didn’t start out as a fixed form, surprisingly. During the Renaissance, they were Italian and Spanish dance-songs and while the French called them villanelle, they didn’t follow any specific scheme. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that the form became fixed by French poet, Theodore de Banville. 

Dylan Thoma’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is probably one of the better-known villanelle poems, even if you’ve never heard of the style.  

To explore more poems, check out this list from the Poetry Foundation.