Villanelle
How to write a villanelle
12 syllales per line
19 lines
The lines are broken up into five tercets (three line stanzas)
followed by a quatrain (four line stanza)
The rhyme scheme is aba aba aba aba aba abaa which means there are only two rhymes.
The first line of the poem repeats as the last line of the second and fourth stanza, and the second-to-last line of the last stanza.
The third line of the poem (last line of the first stanza) repeats as the last line of the third, fifth, and last stanza.
This means that the last line of every stanza (and the last two lines of the last stanza) is already written once you've completed the first stanza.
There is no rule for the length of lines, though most I've read use iambic pentameter.
You can play with your line length and rhythm, but the best flow will be achieved if every line has the same meter. This is not a hard and fast rule though, and you can definitely vary line length if it sounds right to the ear.
Read it aloud to see how it sounds.
it is important that the repeated lines flow easily and organically along with the surrounding lines, and don't look and sound like they were pasted in from somewhere else.
Skilled poets can extract more meaning from these refrains each time they reappear, creating a theme that builds in intensity.
you are free to use near rhymes (eg: fall/bell) or sight rhymes (eg: bone/one) if you cannot find a perfect rhyme that says what you need to say. Meaning is always more important than rhyme.