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

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

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

From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood