villanelle

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

In “Missing Dates,” a haunting villanelle about helpless love and despair, William Empson writes: “Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills./ The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”

From Washington Post • Mar. 10, 2020

But it’s also, low-key, a villanelle, a rhymed 19-line form with two lines that repeat identically in different places throughout the poem and come together to form its closing couplet.

From Slate • Aug. 8, 2019

WH Auden’s villanelle If I could tell you is recalled in the last line, where the gloved hand appears “as though it intends to stay”.

From The Guardian • Jul. 31, 2017

She’d fought to master the loss, writing seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque.

From The New Yorker • Feb. 26, 2017

“Mine have poetic meter. A villanelle, actually,” Beowulf added modestly.

From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood