Villanelles

Between "Do not go gentle into that good night" (Thomas), "The Waking" (Roethke), and "One Art" (Bishop), I believe that Bishop was able to most effectively use the villanelle form to her advantage in her poem. Thomas creates a rather morbid scene, focusing on death and it's forms; no matter one's knowledge, one's deeds, one's wildness, one would succumb to death. However, his use of parallelism throughout the poem, though tying the concepts together, leads to a highly formulaic and repetitive work. Unlike Thomas, whose employs a more straightforward technique of writing and metaphor, Roethke's writing in "The Waking" taps into the inner workings of the mind, with his villanelle constantly repeating the paradox of "I wake to sleep". The villanelle confines Roethke to a set pattern and process to a theme where more free flowing thought would better convey the meaning. Yet, does he employ the villanelle to his poem in order to create the structure that wakefulness brings rather than the fluidity that one could experience through sleep? Who knows. However, it's Bishop who, in my opinion, has best utilized the villanelle in her poem. The other two had incredible structure to their writings, much like they were trying to convey their meanings within confinement. Bishop, on the other hand, has a natural gait in her villanelle that supersedes the halting stops the other two seem to have. While she continually repeats "The art of losing isn't hard to master," she naturally incorporates the rest of her story around it, as well as tying in trivial losses, such as the loss of her mothers loss, and losses that carry more weight, such as "losing you,"to one another and to the reader himself.