Definition: The word “villanelle” comes from the Italian
villano (“peasant”), and a villanelle was originally a dance-song sung by a Renaissance troubadour, with a pastoral or rustic theme & no particular form. The modern form with its alternating refrain lines took shape after Jean Passerat’s famous 16th century villanelle, “J’ai perdu ma tourtourelle” (“I Have Lost My Turtle Dove”).
The villanelle is a poem of 19 lines, five triplets and a quatrain, using only two rhymes throughout the whole form. The entire first line is repeated as lines 6, 12 and 18 and the third line is repeated as lines 9, 15 and 19 -- so that the lines which frame the first triplet weave through the poem like refrains in a traditional song, and form the end of the concluding stanza. With these repeating lines represented as A1 and A2 (because they rhyme), the entire rhyme scheme is:
A1bA2
abA1
abA2
abA1
abA2
abA1A2
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