Killer Form

     These days, if you mention the word "Villanelle," a lot of us will think of this:


via GIPHY

     That's Villanelle the endlessly charming assassin-for-hire, played by Julie Comer on the BBC TV show Killing Eve. You should totally be watching it, but not right now, because we're still talking about poetry here.
     In poetic circles, "villanelle" has another meaning. To quote Wikipedia, it is:

     a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

     Easy-peasy, right?
     The challenge of writing a good villanelle is to repeat oneself a whole lot without becoming dull. It's like writing a good pop song: "We're gonna jackhammer this chorus into your brain, and you're gonna like it."
     You've almost certainly run across at least one villanelle in your life: "Do not go gentle into that good night," by Dylan Thomas, recommended to us by Carolyn the librarian.

        
   The famous supposed last words of Dylan Thomas were "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record!" We should not conclude that difficult verse forms are enough to drive a man to drink.