Poetry Witchery Q&A: The Proper Meter for a Villanelle

Villanelles (Everymans Library, 2012). The anthology for which I collected villanelles for twenty years, desperately seeking non-iambic villies and finding far too few of them (my own conteribution, at least, is in amphibrachs).

Welcome to a new feature of Poetry Witchery: occasional questions from readers, students, colleagues, and yes, followers of this Substack (if you have a burning question on meter and/or magic, do find me through my website; the link’s in the Cauldron).

Here’s a question someone sent on Twitter recently, which I have heard quite often in different forms over the years:

Dear Annie, please forgive this abrupt interruption of your day, but you were the poetry expert of whom I thought first when this question came to mind: is it particularly odd (or gauche in some way) to write a villanelle entirely in alexandrines (with accepted substitutions)? NO pressure for an immediate response. Many thanks again for your wisdom, Alix B

Dear Alix,

Yes, it is fully acceptable to write a villanelle in alexandrines. There may be one in my anthology Villanelles, although I can’t recall; I certainly looked hard for villanelles in meters beyond iambic pentameter while editing that book!

As with the sonnet, triolet, and almost all fixed forms (the sapphic and alcaic stanzas are exceptions), the villanelle form is based only on rhyme and repetition,