Hello Karri,Karri wrote:Firstly, the redundancy of "Villanelle For Our Time". The man makes his point clearly enough during the first couple of minutes, why does he insist on "rubbing it in"? With the wealth of material the man has to draw upon, one would think he´d have enough lyrics (original ones, at that!) to fill an album with no need for repetition.
what you call "redundancy" is the very essence of the poetic form. A villanelle has 19 lines following this scheme:
A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2
A1 and A2 stand for full lines that rhyme. They are (in the purest form) repeated without change. The lines I represent with "a" rhyme with both of them. The b-lines all rhyme as well (different rhyme).
The real challenge of the villanelle is avoiding boredom. The repeating lines should appear in a slightly different context (though ideally with exactly the same words). The whole poem should continually rise to the final rhyming couplet.
If the poet succeeds this creates an atmosphere of high emotional intensity. The "Villanelle For Our Time", to me, definitely succeeds. Frank Scott created one of the better villanelles. (And LC's rendition is far beyond having to be explicitely praised...)
The first "Villanellas" have been written in mediaeval Italy. Italian, like French, is a language with literally millions of rhymes. English is comparatively poor in that respect. This might explain that the Villanelle is quite rarely used in Angloamerican poetry: Oscar Wilde has written one, there are a few by Edward Arlington Robinson. I remember one by W. H. Auden.
The most famous English villanelle, and probably the greatest, actually to my mind one of the greatest poems of the 20th century, is by Dylan Thomas, who btw died in the "Chelsea Hotel". It goes like this:
The Welsh poet wrote this perfect villanelle on occasion of his father's death. Richard Burton rendered it on Dylan Thomas' own funeral. Hearing Dylan Thomas read "Do not go gentle..." started me into poetry.DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It may seem quite easy to write a villanelle, but it turns out to be very hard to write even a mediocre one. (I know what I'm talking about, since I tried a couple of years ago. Never before or after have I worked on a few lines for such a long time. Three guesses why I didn't publish it...)
Tom