VILLANELLE, primarily a round song taken up by men on a farm (Lat. villa) ; originally loose in form, but afterwards ar bitrarily fixed. It was a pastoral, set to a rustic dance, and had, therefore, a regular system of repeated lines. The old French villanelles, however, were irregular; the "Rosette, pour un peu d'absence" of Desportes (d. 16°6), is a sort of ballade, and those of d'Urfe (d. 1625) are scarcely less lax. The rigorous form seems to have been settled by accident. Among the posthumous poems of Jean Passerat (d. 1602) several villanelles were found, of which one became so popular as to set the standard for subse quent poets. It runs thus: For 30o years the villanelle has been written in tercets, on two rhymes, the first and the third being repeated alternately in each tercet. It is usual to confine it to five tercets, but that is not essential; it must, however, close with a quatrain, the last two lines of which are the first and third of the original tercet.
Boulmier, who was the. first to show that Passerat was its in ventor, published collections of these poems in 1878 and 5879, and was preparing another when he died, in 1881. When, in 5877, so many of the early French forms of verse were reintroduced into English, the villanelle attracted much attention; it was simul taneously cultivated by W. E. Henley, Austin Dobson, Lang and Gosse. Henley wrote a large number, and described the form in a specimen beginning : "A dainty thing's the Villanelle." There are several examples in English of humorous villanelles, especially by Austin Dobson and by Henley.
See J. Boulmier, Les Villanelles (2nd ed., 1879).