Free Poster: What is a Villanelle?
Introduce your students to the villanelle, a type of fixed verse form of poetry! Villanelles consist of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first tercet appearing alternatively at the end of the remaining tercets and as the final two lines of the quatrain. This poster explains the structure and rhyme scheme of a villanelle using American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The House on the Hill” as an example. Color-coded lines will help students clearly visualize the villanelle’s unique rhyming pattern.
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