POETS Day! The Villanelle

Back when I managed a pirate’s crew of waiters and bartenders I grew to accept that a set percentage of my charges was damaged, irredeemable, and blessedly transient. Exhibit A would be Stony McStonerton (not her real name.) Stony was the illegally baffled eighteen year old child of a large wealthy family. You knew she grew up rich because both her first and last names were last names. We got the dirt on her from one of our other employees, her cousin, who had the same two last names but in a different order. Stony struggled to be the black sheep in a family full of sootiness. The competition proved daunting so she retreated into a bong and watched the parade, figuring whatever direction trouble came from there would be a bail out so why not enjoy the show. One big weekend – Valentine’s or some such – when we needed all hands she asked off to see a band in Atlanta. We couldn’t let her go so she gave us the usual shrug, but there was something different about the gesture this time. In retrospect I’d say it lacked her trademark resignation. Five minutes before the Friday shift she called in sounding miserable and claiming sickness. The caller ID said Holiday Inn, Atlanta, GA. Stony was terrible at POETS Day. Her version of the Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday battle cry whimpered along I-20 and flounced, exhausted, in the restaurant’s back office. But… but you have to admire that she stayed true to herself. She could be counted on not to be counted on and through her lack of effort we confirm that the POETS Day spirit dwells within us all, just longing to be free. This POETS Day let’s reach out to those least capable of deceit and include them in our plans, and not just as convenient patsies if things go south or because they might put everything on some uncle’s credit card again. Get out of work early, soak in some sun, and see what bands are playing. It’s your weekend. Don’t wait for permission to get it started. In the meantime, maybe a little verse?

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I just read that villanelles are sometimes called villanesques. I’ve not heard that before but suddenly I wish that they were usually called villanesques and only sometimes called villanelles. I’m picturing a poetic Legion of Doom with Hilaire Belloc and Sylvia Plath as Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, a mustachioed Rupert Brooke twirling Snidely Whiplash style in the corner, and a cackling Marianne Moore studying tarot cards while absently twisting the arm off an Ida Tarbell voodoo doll. T.S. Eliot makes a natural Moriarty.

“What manner of villainy are you poets up to?”

“We’re not up to any villainy, detective. It’s just a little villanesque.”

Missed opportunity.

As forms go, the villanelle wants you not to take it seriously. At a glance, it’s childish. It seems the stuff of sing-song nursery rhymes. It is not.

The modern villanelle was popularized by Jean Passerat in 1606 with the publication of his poem “Villanelle (J’ay perdu ma tourterelle.)” It’s made up of five three line stanzas, or tercets, each with an aba rhyme scheme and a final four line stanza, or quatrain, with an abaa scheme. The form imposes no meter, but tetrameter and pentameter are common in English. The first line is repeated as a refrain in the last line of the second and fourth tercet and the third line of the quatrain while the last line of the first tercet is repeated as a refrain in the last line of the third and fifth tercet and then ends the poem as the last line of the quatrain.

The name, villanelle more directly than the more interesting villanesque, takes it’s name from the Italian word villanella meaning a pastoral song or dance. It’s thought that villanellas may have been participatory with the crowd shouting out refrains and a poet or series of poets filling in, either from memory or ad-libbed, the rest of the lyrics in response or as prompt.

Poetry derives from music. Even the most aggressively avant garde poets of today, avoiders of meter, rhyme, and traditional structure, acknowledge the relationship by including the word “verse” in the phrase “free verse.” Melody is always there. In a villanelle – I’ll have failed if the reader thinks I’m saying that word’s meaning and function aren’t integral – the music is exalted.

I’ve been referencing Ezra Pound a lot lately but I’ve been reading a lot of Ezra Pound lately and his critiques are brilliant so I’m going to reference him again. Forgive me. In his essay “How to Read” he writes “there are three ‘kinds of poetry,’” but he doesn’t mean “kinds of.” He means “aspects to” as what he lists as kinds can overlap and play variously together. Of the aspect he calls Melopoeia, that “wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property”, he writes that it “can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written.”

Below is that first modern villanelle by Passerat. You can read the translation here but I’ve chosen to print the poem in the original French to isolate the “musical property” Pound holds up by setting aside the words’ “plain meaning” for a moment. If you speak French, congratulations. You gamed the system. But for the rest, read the poem phonetically paying attention only to the rhythm.

Villanelle (J’ay perdu ma tourterelle)
Jean Passerat (1534-1602)

J’ay perdu ma tourterelle                             a             Refrain 1
Est-ce point celle que j’oy?                          b
Je veux aller après elle.                                a             Refrain 2

Tu regrettes ta femelle,                                a
Helas! Aussi fai-je moy,                                b
J’ay perdu ma tourterelle.                            a             Refrain 1

Si ton Amour est fidelle                                a
Aussi est ferme ma foy,                                b
Je veux aller après elle.                                a             Refrain 2

Ta plainte se renouvelle;                              a
Tousjours plaindre je me doy:                    b
J’ay perdu ma tourterelle.                            a             Refrain 1

En ne voyant plus la belle                            a
Plus rein de beau je ne voy;                        b
Je veux aller après elle.                                a             Refrain 2

Mort, que tant je fois j’appelle,                  a
Pren ce qui se donne à toy:                         b
J’ay perdue ma tourterelle,                         a             Refrain 1
Je veux aller après elle.                                a             Refrain 2

Since there are no poetry cops, liberties are taken wherever structural orthodoxy tries to impose itself. William Kees changes the rhyme scheme giving each refrain its own end sound and in doing so, changes the tenor of the associated tercet, the a rhymed pondering circumstances and the c rhymed defiant or resigned but either way fatalistic.

The form is a mood cauldron in the sense that whatever emotional state the author begins with the villanelle concentrates. Here, concern reduces to knowing dread.

from Five Villanelles (I)
William Kees (1914-disappeared, presumed dead 1955)

The crack is moving down the wall.                         a
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.                         b
We must remain until the roof falls in.                    c            

It’s mildly cheering to recall                                       a
That every building has its little flaws.                    b
The crack is moving down the wall.                         a

Here in the kitchen, drinking gin,                              c
We cannot accept the damndest laws.                   b
We must remain until the roof falls in.                    c

And though there’s no one here at all,                    a
One searches every room because                           b
The crack is moving down the wall.                         a

Repairs? But how can one begin?                             c
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.      b
We must remain until the roof falls in.                    c

These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,       a
The sort of thing that gives one pause.                   b
The crack is moving down the wall.                         a
We must remain until the roof falls in.                    c

In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop repeats only the last word, “disaster,” in lines where the second refrain belongs. Changes each time a regular refrain is due underline that each increasingly emotional loss, the subject of her poem, is unique though tied together in that they all seem a disaster whether that assessment is warranted or not. Here, relying on the reader’s knowledge of the villanelle she signals to the reader by breaking with expectation.

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Finally, Dylan Thomas wrote “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” guaranteeing that no full discussion of villanelles could exclude him. He published it a year before his father, sick and blind, passed. The persona has no problem with death per se. It’s good and can be approached gently. That doesn’t mean you don’t have cause to resist it.

He speaks as one man, but you can hear the thrumming of the rustic participants round the campfire, feeding his voice. He’s appealing to everything the spirit’s soon to shed – the vital, the carnal, the visceral – to exhaust itself. Thomas masters his language and anchors us sensually with the poem’s music so that we fall into rhythm with the imagined campfire chorus supporting him.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.