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The villanelle is a form of poem which follows a strict pattern (“nowadays follows a strict pattern,” I should say, since what have been called villanettes have not always followed today’s patterns).

These are the rules of a villanelle:

To illustrate, here’s Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” from 1947:

Do not go gentle into that good night

by Dylan Thomas

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 grieved 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.

Mark how lines one and three of the first verse are repeated as refrains in the rest of the verses. They also provide the end rhyme that the first line of all verses adhere to (night, light, right, bright, flight, sight, height). Line two of all the verses have a different end rhyme (day, they, bay, way, gay, pray). And then the two lines of refrain come together to end the poem in the last verse, and that verse consequently gets four lines rather than three.

Here’s what my 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica says about the villanelle:

Villanelle, a form of verse, originally loose in construction, but since the 16th century bound in exact limits of an arbitrary kind. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin villa, a country house or farm, through the Italian villano, a peasant or farm hand, and a villanelle was primarily a round song taken up by men on a farm. The Spaniards called such as song a villancejo or villancete or a villancico, and a man who improvised villanelles was a villanciquero. The villanelle was a pastoral poem made to accompany a rustic dance, and from the first it was necessary that it should contain a regular system of repeated lines. The old French villanelles, however, were irregular in form. […] It appears, indeed, to have been by an accident that the special and rigorously defined form of the villanelle was invented. In the posthumous poems of Jean Passerat (1534-1604), which were printed in 1606, several villanelles were discovered, in different forms. One of these became, and has remained, so deservedly popular, that it has given its exact character to subsequent history of the villanelle. […] The villanelle [has] for the last three hundred years […] been a poem, written in tercets, on two rhymes, the first and the third line being repeated alternatively in each tercet. It is usual to confine the villanelle to five tercets, but that is not essential; it must, however, close with a quatrain, the last two lines of which are the first and third line of the original tercet. The villanelle was extremely admired by the French poets of the Parnasse, and one of them, Théodore de Banville, compared it to a ribband of silver and gold traversed by a thread of rose-colour.
Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1910-1911), volume XXVII.

Stephen Fry, in The Ode Less Travelled, suggests the villanelle seems to often be the fancy of outsiders (and those who feel like outsiders), and he hypothesises that the strict form works well for people who live otherwise chaotic lives:

Sometimes the rules of form can be as powerfully modern a response to chaos, moral uncertainty and relativism as open freedom can be. The more marginalised, chaotic, alienated and physically damaged a life, the greater the impulse to find structure and certainty, surely? The playful artifice of a villanelle, preposterous as it may appear at first glance, can embody defiant gestures and attitudes of vengeful endurance. It suits a rueful, ironic reiteration of pain and fatalism.

And in that vein, here’s Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” first published in 1953, and another great example of a modern villanelle:

Mad Girl’s Love Song

by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.) 

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

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