(from It. villanella , a rustic song or dance, villano , a peasant). Introduced into France in the 16th c. (Grévin, Du Bellay, Desportes), the v. first had as its only distinguishing features a pastoral subject and use of a refrain; in other respects it was without rule, although a sequence of four 8-line stanzas with a refrain of one or two lines repeated at the end of each stanza was a popular option. The form only became standardized in the 17th c., when prosodists such as Richelet based their definition on “J’ay perdu ma tourterelle” by Jean Passerat (1534-1602), a poem in tercets on only two rhymes, in which the first and third line of the first tercet are repeated alternately as the third line of the following tercets, and appear together at the end of the final stanza, thus creating a quatrain. Passerat’s v. is of 19 lines and can be schematized thus: A 1 bA 2 ab A 1 ab A 2 ab A 1 ab A 2 ab A 1 A 2 (A 1 and A 2 denote different [rhyming] refrain lines). Obviously the v. is essentially stanzaic in nature, and this is how Fr. poets have treated it, extending it and contracting it at will; in his presentation of the form, Thèodore de Banville quotes a v. of Philoxene Boyer “La Marquise Aurore,” which has 25 lines, while “L’Orni-ere,” one of Maurice Rollinat’s large output of vs., has as many as 85 lines; Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, uses only 13 lines in his “V”. and 18 in “Dans l’ air léger,” which omits the final A 2 and takes other liberties with the final stanza’s rhyme scheme.
While the Fr. poets who revived the v. in the later 19th c treated it as a stanza type, their Eng. counterparts, however, invested it with the status of a fixed form. Although Austin Dobson tried to present the v. to the Eng. as he found it in Banville, declaring “there is no restriction as to the number of stanzas,” his compatriots stuck rigidly to the 19-line Passerat model popularized by Joseph Boulmier ( Vs. , 1878). Enthusiasts for the form were legion (Edmund Gosse, Dobson, Andrew Lang, W. E. Henley, Ernest Dowson, Hardy, Wilde, E. A. Robinson). While the v. continued to attract pastoral subjects (Dowson, Wilde), it also became a vehicle for vers de société and, in a small way, part of the attempt to find an equivalent for the Horatian ode in the Romance fixed forms (e. g. Dobson, Tu ne quaesieris , Odes 1, 11). Lang remarked: “There is a foreign grace and a little technical difficulty overcome in the Eng. ballade and v. , as in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics”.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the fortunes of the v. have prospered in the 20th c Following Leconte de Lisle, Auden (“If I Could Tell You,” “Miranda’s Song”), Dylan Thomas (“Do not go Gentle into that Good Night”) and Roy Fuller (“The Fifties,” “Magic”) among others (Empson, Roethke, Plath) have explored the v.’s capacity to deal with serious, even metaphysical subjects while adhering to the strict 19-line model. A more recent tendency, deriving in part perhaps from Pound’s free-verse “V.: The Psychological Hour,” has sought to introduce greater flexibility into the traditional form by exploiting enjambment, metrical variation, and half-rhymes (James Merrill, Richard Hugo). There have even been efforts at a prose v., 19 sentences matching the pattern in repetition but not rhyme.
Banville describes the v. as “a plait of gold and silver threads into which is woven a third, rose-colored thread”. The A refrains certainly have a metallic, unyielding character. Of Dowson’s vs. Pound writes: “the refrains are an emotional fact which the intellect, in the various gyrations of the poem, tries in vain and in vain to escape”. Banville’s rose-colored thread, on the other hand, is to be found in the b lines, which attempt to withstand the conspiracy of the refrains and assert change and mortality, and for that reason have a peculiar poignancy and vulnerability. —T. de Banville, Petit Traité de poésie franÇaise (1872); E. Gosse, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” Cornhill Magazine 36 (1877); A. Dobson, “A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse,” Latter Day Lyrics , ed. W. Davenport Adams (1878); J. Gleeson White, Ballades and Rondeaus (1887); Schipper; Kastner; H. L. Cohen, Lyric Forms from France (1922); Scott; Morier; R. E. McFarland, “Victorian Vs.,” VP 20 (1982), “The Revival of the V,” RR 73 (1982), “The Contemporary V”. MPS 11 (1982); M. Pfister, “Die V. in der englischen moderne,” Anglia 219 (1982).
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