So, I first saw villanelles and thought of villains, but it's completely different. Yet, you can remember it this way because they are often writing about love and how pain and missing a loved one recurs. A villanelle is a nineteen line poetic for with five tercets followed by a quatrain. It is a form of a fixed verse form and is in a way pastoral. Two refrains exist along with two repeating rhymes. It appears to me that the purpose is to show that something keeps returning, shown by the repetition of the style of the poem. We can remember this because the villain of a story usually keeps returning and doing evil things!
Thomas uses this style of poetry to talk about how people should live their lives and how they should feel about dying. "Not go gentle into that good night" follows the pattern of the idea of death returning, but the people should fight on.
Roethke's poem uses the repetition to show a pattern of life, including the cycle of sleep. The tercets include different rhythms of life. He even talks about how we wakeup so that then we can sleep, making this a repetitive cycle.
Bishop uses villanelle to talk about the significance of loss. She describes the "art of losing" in many different ways." She goes from losing a simple item to losing a person or memory. The villanelle is appropriate to employ the theme of loss in the poem.
I thought that Bishop did the best job with villanelle and made it to the best use because a clear message and theme can be derived from the poem. The others didn't seem as clear and didn't have as significant of a take home message,
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