This week, a real challenge: The villanelle may be the most demanding of all constrictive poetic forms, but it rewards the effort whether or not the end result succeeds. The form calls for 19 lines divided into five three-line stanzas followed by a final four-line stanza. Repetition is the key. The first line of the poem is also the last line of stanzas one and four; the poem’s third line is repeated at the end of stanzas three, five, and six. The middle line of every stanza must rhyme with the middle line of stanza one. Thus, there are only two rhyming words spread out over the course of the work.

The rhyme that concludes the poem—our two repeating lines, now consecutive—may reach a sublime end. Consider the final stanza in Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That good Night”:

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.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” probably the most celebrated villanelle since Thomas’s, begins:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The key rhyme, between “master” and “disaster,” sets up an opposition between the mastery of art and the disastrous nature of experience. As the poem widens its focus, Bishop gets enormous mileage out of “losing” and “loss,” terms that apply to door keys, “my mother’s watch,” two cities, a continent, and—finally—you.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The greatest of W. H. Auden’s villanelles begins with this stanza:

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

To conclude the poem, Auden turns his opening line into a question:

Suppose all the lions get up and go, And all the brooks and soldiers run away; Will Time say nothing but I told you so? If I could tell you I would let you know.

The poem is sometimes titled “If I Could Tell You.” In his 1945 Collected Poetry, Auden called it “But I Can’t.”

Readers are encouraged to read these three villanelles in their entirety; I have linked them above.

When you attempt a villanelle, you begin by composing the two repeating lines. Then you go one stanza at a time. Some argue in favor of a strict adherence to the rules, a position that I might defend in a debate, but in practice I will always opt for creative liberty. The impulse to veer from the form is irresistible.

For this week’s challenge, I have come up with an opening stanza:

I pray, though what I pray for I do not know. Permit me please to deny the fury I fear. The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.

NLP players, do the best you can with this stanza. Propose the next line, if not the next stanza.

The next line must rhyme with “know.” Even though my repeating lines scan as iambic pentameter, feel free to deviate. The words “know” and “sorrow” may rhyme with monosyllables ranging from “owe” to “now,” while “sorrow” can hook up with “marrow” as easily as with “borrow” and “tomorrow.”

A new stanza would begin like this:

… [rhyme with know/sorrow] … [rhyme with fear] I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.

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In my previous column, posted on Labor Day, I suggested writing a poem beginning with a readymade title. These were the titles I tossed out:

• Warning-Track Power
• Having It All: An Elegy
• A Missed Connection
• Pickup in Green Park
• Shotgun Wedding
• Where Monday Went to Die
• The Bad Old Days
• It’s All Good
• The Press Gurney
• Silver Blaze Millicent Calibancame through with “Missed Connections”:

Novels may end with happily ever afters, while tragedies feature double deaths. But poems are the place for missed connections, what might have been but never was.

You saw him in the window of a train, and sensed he was your destiny: too late. The whistle blew and ripped him from your dreams. The platform of reality so desolate and bare, the tracks receding into futures past.

Lesson learned! Next time don’t hesitate to jump aboard. Believe the promises made by movies black and white. But know the next train will be headed somewhere else.

The last two lines of the first stanza achieve a quiet eloquence; the second stanza introduces the compelling metaphor of a train about to depart a station. These two stanzas are so fine that I would advise Millicent to drop what follows and end here—or develop further the narrative bifurcations in which “you” go one way and “he” goes another as destiny sees fit.

One of the beguiling elements of Anna Ojascastro Guzon‘s “Having It All: An Elegy” is that the relation of title to text leaves so much for the reader to imagine:

You never did look at yourself in a mirror or your grade school diorama, constructed from quick-dry clay. The boy, who had a hard time staying still, knocked your cardboard box off your classroom desk, and the branches of your sculpted sycamore cracked into pieces like the centuries-old tree that fell on top of our house. The metamorphic limbs were all too human-like to dispose of. As usual I kept all the fractured parts as if devotion could breathe warmth into cold fingertips.

Paul Michelsencontributes a prayer, using as his title “Litany of Humility,” which does not appear on my list but serves him admirably:

From the verge of the worst ever nervous breakdown in the history of nervous breakdowns, deliver me, O Lord From the burning wish to give in and embrace my most grandiose delusions, deliver me, O Lord From the desire to be adopted by the Kardashians or some other stinking rich family, deliver me, O Lord From the temptation to dropkick a Karen or a Darren in the midst of their next public hissyfit, deliver me, O Lord From the aching need to flick my boss hard on his left nut, just once, deliver me, O Lord From the urge to go through with my plot to infiltrate a local cult, rising up in the ranks until becoming its leader, and changing its name to Fred’s Snazzy Pinochle Club, deliver me, O Lord From my lifelong dream of starting my own cartel and calling it El Elegante Club de Pinochle de Fred, deliver me, O Lord Amen.

One of my own favorite idioms is “It’s all good,” because one utters the statement only when something bad is afoot. Emilyimagines “It’s all good” as a song sung by “Ella” (presumably Fitzgerald):

You can’t see me today? You have a bat mitzvah to go to? I get it You didn’t answer my texts because you were at a friend’s house? Don’t sweat it You can’t call, you’re with another friend? That’s ok! I’ll see you at school anyways Always looking through the window of “maybe later” and “some other time” Always knocking on the door of “please leave a message after the tone” But don’t worry it’s alright It’s all good

What I like best about Josie Cannella’s “Warning-Track Power” is the implication that a single letter in the alphabet may signify the evolution of “love” to “lose”:

*“Soy un perdedor / I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?” —Beck * You promised everything, so I gave everything up, every dollar, every secret, every inch of my body. I thought you were everything, and you were every note you wrote and played on that guitar, but I’m a loser, baby, with only warning-track power. I lost you.

I said I’m a quick study, and I was. You studied me quickly. I’m not hard to figure out. I’m a bear of very little brain. I’ve learned so much, but I don’t know anything.

The distance between winning and losing is only millimeters, one letter, and in the end, does it mean anything different?

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I conclude this column with a poem I wrote in 1975. It appeared in London’s Times Literary Supplement, and in my first book of poems, but I offer “The More You Have to lose” not because it is exemplary but just to show what a young man can do with this highly difficult form:

Time lies, and a year can go by in a day. Look at your watch. Do your eyes say 2:45 at 9:15? The more you have, the more you can give away.

You know the feeling, having no money, having to stay With relatives when you travel, unable to say what you mean: Time lies, and a year can go by in a day.

When my father turned into my son, as in a play, All the fun took place offstage. What about the missing queen? The more you have, the more you can give away.

The less you believe. The more you wish you could pray. Like a clock without hands, the truth of a face remains unseen. Time lies, and a year can go by in a day.

With an elbow on the counter, and no passions left to sway, The all-night waitress smokes butt after butt, coughing in-between: The more you have, the more you can throw away.

Ocean, what is on the other side of all that blue and gray? What does the grass know of yesterday’s vanished green? Time lies, and a year can go by in a day. The more you have, the more you can give away

1975

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, critic, and the general editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthology and author of the book One Hundred Autobiographies. He currently writes our Talking Pictures column.