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

This is the distinction Elizabeth Bishop illuminates, by pretending to elide it, in her villanelle “One Art,” perhaps the most famous reckoning with loss in all of literature.

From The New Yorker • Feb. 5, 2017

She pivots formally, too, between hints of the sestina and the villanelle.

From New York Times • May 31, 2016

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

From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood