How to Write a Villanelle Poem Step by Step: A Complete Guide

How to write a villanelle poem step by step

Nineteen lines. Two rhymes. And one couplet that refuses to leave you alone.

I still have the first villanelle I ever finished, saved in a file called villanelle_attempt_7_FINAL.docx. Seven drafts. Six weeks. The poem is thirty lines shorter than the notebook I filled trying to get it right. And here's the thing nobody tells you when you sit down to learn how to write a villanelle poem step by step: the form isn't hard to understand. It's hard to obey. The structure fits in a paragraph. Writing something inside it that doesn't sound like a robot filling out a form — that's the actual work.

So let me walk you through it the way I wish someone had walked me through it. Not the theory first. The order of operations.

What is the structure of a villanelle poem?

The structure of a villanelle is a fixed pattern of 19 lines divided into six stanzas: five groups of three lines, then one group of four. Two lines — the first and the third of the opening tercet — come back as refrains. Once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it.

Here's the whole skeleton, using A1 for the first line, A2 for the third line, and a and b for the two rhymes:

• Stanza 1: A1 b A2
• Stanza 2: a b A1
• Stanza 3: a b A2
• Stanza 4: a b A1
• Stanza 5: a b A2
• Stanza 6: a b A1 A2

Count the A1s: lines 1, 6, 12, 18. Count the A2s: lines 3, 9, 15, 19. Everything else rhymes on a or b, alternating like a metronome. That's it. That's the entire machine.

Why the refrain placement matters more than the rhyme

Most beginners obsess over finding rhymes and treat the refrains as a formatting chore. Backwards. The rhymes are just scaffolding. The refrains are the poem.

Think about what happens structurally. A1 appears in line 1, then line 6, then line 12, then line 18. Each time it lands in a different stanza, surrounded by different lines, which means it cannot mean exactly the same thing. The words are identical; the context has moved. Line 18 sits right next to A2 in that final quatrain, so the two refrains collide at the end — and that collision is the emotional payoff the whole form is engineered to deliver.

If your refrains mean the same thing on line 18 that they meant on line 1, you haven't written a villanelle. You've written a poem with a stutter.

Villanelle rhyme scheme: the two-sound rule

Two sounds. That's your entire sonic budget.

The -a rhyme has to carry nine lines (all the A1s and A2s plus the a lines in stanzas 2 through 6). The -b rhyme handles six. Nine and six. Those numbers are why people quit.

English is stingy with rhyme compared to French or Italian, which is part of why the villanelle migrated so comfortably into English — it's a form that punishes vocabulary gaps. If you pick -a as "night," you need eight more rhymes on that sound. Light, sight, write, white, tight, flight, bright, outright. That's a real list. If you pick a word with four good rhymes, you're stuck by stanza three and you'll start bending syntax until it snaps.

How to test a rhyme sound before you commit

Open a blank page and write the rhyme sound at the top. Now list every usable word you can reach without a thesaurus. Do this before you write a single line.

I do this now, every time. The first villanelle I wrote, I chose "-ove" — love, above, dove, glove. Four words, and one of them is a bird. I got four lines in and started writing things like "the sky I'm thinking of" to force the rhyme. The poem died on my kitchen table at 1 a.m.

Look, here's the honest test: if your rhyme list has fewer than eight solid candidates, change the sound. No exceptions. It takes ninety seconds to redo and saves you a week.

Two more constraints worth knowing before you start:

• Identical rhymes count against you. Rhyming "night" with "night" is a technical cheat and readers hear it.
• Near-rhyme is a judgment call. Modern poets use it freely. In a strictly formal villanelle, though, the whole pleasure comes from the lock clicking shut.

Do villanelles use iambic pentameters?

Not by rule. The villanelle's constraints are stanza count, rhyme scheme, and refrain repetition — meter is not one of them. Nothing in the form requires iambic pentameter, and plenty of published villanelles wander between three and six beats per line.

That said, most English-language villanelles you'll encounter do use it. Ten syllables, five stresses, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. The reason is practical rather than traditionalist: a line of iambic pentameter is long enough to build a real sentence and short enough to be repeated four times without exhausting the reader. It's the same line length Shakespeare used, and for the same reason — it approximates speech.

My advice, and I'll defend this: write your first villanelle in iambic pentameter. Not because the form demands it, but because the discipline teaches you which words are load-bearing. You'll cut filler you didn't know you were writing. Then, on villanelle number two, break the meter wherever it serves the poem.

Syllable counts and the meter question

If you commit to pentameter, aim for ten syllables per line. Eleven is a common and forgivable variation; twelve starts to sag. You'll notice the difference when you read it aloud — an eleven-syllable line with a feminine ending can sound elegant, while a line with three extra syllables sounds like a prose sentence that lost its way.

Element	Required?	Common practice
19 lines total	Yes	Universal
Five tercets + one quatrain	Yes	Universal
Two rhyme sounds (A and B)	Yes	Universal
Refrain repetition pattern	Yes	Universal
Iambic pentameter	No	Most English villanelles
Strict ten-syllable lines	No	Frequent but flexible
Refrains word-for-word identical	Usually	Small variations allowed

Notice that last row. Some poets allow themselves a tiny alteration — a pronoun, a tense — on one return of a refrain. Others treat any change as a violation. Both camps publish. I'd keep the refrains identical for your first attempt, because the whole point of the form is that the same words do different work.

How to write a villanelle step by step

Six moves. Do them in this order and the form stops fighting you.

Step 1: Write the two refrain lines first

Do not write line 1 and then keep going. Write line 1 and line 3 as a pair, knowing they'll stand side by side at the end of the poem in the quatrain.

Read them together out loud. Do they rhyme? Do they set up a tension you can pull on for seventeen more lines? The best refrain pairs contain an argument — one line asserts, the other resists.

A trick that works for me: draft ten candidate pairs, then pick the one that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Comfortable refrain pairs produce comfortable poems, and comfortable poems get abandoned.

Step 2: Build your rhyme lists

Two columns. Eight to twelve entries each. If either column is short, go back to Step 1 and choose a new sound.

Step 3: Draft the tercets out of order

You do not have to write stanza 2 before stanza 3. I usually write the ones I have ideas for and leave gaps. The refrain positions are fixed, so you can always see where you are.

Each tercet has one free line that rhymes with line 1, one that rhymes with line 3, and one refrain. That's a lot of structure. Use it as a prompt rather than a cage.

Step 4: Make each refrain return mean something new

This is the real craft, and it's where most drafts fail. Line 1 might state a fact. Line 6 might state it as an accusation. Line 12 might state it as a resignation. Line 18 might state it as a confession. Same nine words, four different weights.

Technique: control what comes immediately before the refrain. The line preceding a repeated line does almost all the work of recontextualizing it. A refrain after "she said nothing" reads completely differently from the same refrain after "I finally understood."

Step 5: Write the closing quatrain last

The final stanza is a b A1 A2. Two new lines, then both refrains back to back. Write the a and b lines after everything else, once you know what the poem has become. These two lines are the hinge — they set up the collision of A1 and A2, and if they're weak, the ending lands flat no matter how good the refrains are.

Step 6: Read it aloud and cut

Read the whole thing standing up. Every place your voice stumbles marks a meter problem or a forced rhyme. Fix those before you fix anything else.

Then check: does any refrain return feel redundant? Cut the line and rewrite. Does a rhyme exist only to satisfy the pattern? Rewrite it. Are there lines you'd defend in an argument? Keep those.

Can you give me an example of a villanelle poem?

The most famous villanelle in English is Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," written for his dying father. It's worth studying because it demonstrates exactly the mechanism I described in Step 4: the refrain "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" means something different in every return. First it's a general cry. By the final quatrain, it's a son begging his father.

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is the other one people cite, and it's the better teaching text for a beginner. She uses the form's repetition to enact the very thing the poem is about — the attempt to master loss through rehearsal. The refrain reads almost casually the first time. By line 19, the word "disaster" has been hollowed out completely. That's seventeen lines of setup paying off in two words.

Here's a short original to show the mechanics without the literary weight. Rhyme sounds: -old and -air.

The story that I never told
is folded in the kitchen drawer —
I keep it where it will not hold.

Four notes on what's happening there:

• Line 1 is A1, line 3 is A2. They'll return four times each.
• "Told" / "hold" rhyme on a. I checked I had enough words before writing: cold, gold, bold, old, mold, scold, unfold. Seven usable entries. Enough.
• The b rhyme is "drawer," which needs partners: air, care, where, there, bare, fair. Also enough.
• Neither refrain line explains itself. That's deliberate — a refrain that announces its own meaning has nothing left to do on return.

For beginners specifically: pick a small, concrete subject for your first attempt. A drawer, a bus stop, a phone that doesn't ring. Abstract subjects like "grief" or "time" will dissolve under the repetition, because there's nothing solid for the refrains to press against. I watched a workshop full of people try to write villanelles about "love" and every single one collapsed by stanza four.

Villanelle template you can copy

Print this, or copy it into your document, and fill in the blanks.

Blank villanelle template (click to expand)

Line 1 (A1): _______________________________

Line 2 (b): _______________________________

Line 3 (A2): _______________________________

Line 4 (a): _______________________________

Line 5 (b): _______________________________

Line 6 (A1 — repeat line 1)

Line 7 (a): _______________________________

Line 8 (b): _______________________________

Line 9 (A2 — repeat line 3)

Line 10 (a): ______________________________

Line 11 (b): ______________________________

Line 12 (A1 — repeat line 1)

Line 13 (a): ______________________________

Line 14 (b): ______________________________

Line 15 (A2 — repeat line 3)

Line 16 (a): ______________________________

Line 17 (b): ______________________________

Line 18 (A1 — repeat line 1)

Line 19 (A2 — repeat line 3)

Eighteen free lines, one repeated pair. That's the whole assignment.

One last thing about process. My first finished villanelle took six weeks and I still don't love it. My most recent one took two evenings, because I stopped trying to write the poem in order and started writing the refrains first. The form rewards planning and punishes improvisation more than any other fixed form I've worked in. If you write a villanelle and it goes badly, the problem is almost never your talent.

It's the order you did things in. Start with the two lines that will haunt the ending. Everything else is just the walk toward them.