Villanelle - Examples

Examples

• "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas.
• "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.
• "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath.
• "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop.
• "If I Could Tell You" by W.H. Auden
• Edwin Arlington Robinson's villanelle "The House on the Hill" was first published in The Globe in September 1894.

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

The winds blow bleak and shrill.

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day

To speak them good or ill:

There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray

Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay

In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

• The villanelle supposedly written by Stephen Dedalus, protagonist in Joyce's novel "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", beginning with the line: "Are you not weary of ardent ways..."