‘I know my parents made me by my hands’: The Villanelle in Ireland

Abstract

Repetition is central to the structure and spirit of the francophone villanelle, a nineteen-line form composed of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The opening and closing lines of the first tercet alternate as the closing lines for subsequent tercets, before coming together as the final two lines of the concluding quatrain. Full end-rhymes are also expected throughout, both in the first and third lines of the tercets, and to connect the middle lines of these stanzas, resulting in a unique and instantly identifiable form: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. This construction, ‘the classic form of repetition and persistence’,1 foregrounds an inability to progress without a turn to the past, as the villanelle ‘circles around and around, refusing to go forward in any kind of linear development … suggesting at the deepest level, powerful recurrences of mood and emotion and memory’.2 The villanelle, informed by what has been described as ‘the law of return’,3 has become one of the more popular conventional forms in contemporary Irish poetry, having attracted a number of established and emerging Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and Sinéad Morrissey. To trace its emergence and entry into anglophone Irish poetry reveals the efforts of contemporary poets to exploit the form’s structure and history to complicate the Irish literary tradition and to foreground their literary inheritance as transnational, transgressing the borders of nation, language, and culture.