washingtonpost.com: Style Live: Books & Reading

Poems by Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop

By Robert Hass
August 9, 1998

A reader from Maryland writes to ask where the villanelle came from. I looked it up: a very old Italian folk song form brought into medieval French poetry and then brought into English by poets at the end of the 19th century. It is based on an intricate rhyme scheme and a schematic repetition of key lines. The effect is mesmerizing; it makes of the music of the poem a kind of haunted waltz. It's easier to give examples than to describe it. Here are two of the best-known villanelles in modern American poetry:

The Waking

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

(By Theodore Roethke, from his Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, Inc.)

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing further, losing faster:
places and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."

Back to the top