TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

As poets, we have so many poetic forms to choose from, and some are… fussier than others. By that, I mean some have more rules for the writer to follow. We could choose to write in free verse all the time, with no rules — and plenty of poets do mostly that, myself included — but there is also a specific rigor and pleasure to working in a received form, to being creative within those constraints. It’s a kind of puzzle that you both build and solve.

The villanelle is one of those puzzles — a highly structured form. It’s made up of six stanzas: five tercets, with three lines each, and a final quatrain, with four lines. But what makes the villanelle instantly recognizable, and arguably “fussy,” are its use of repetition and rhyme.

The villanelle has two refrains, or lines that repeat in specific places, plus a rigid rhyme scheme. There is one end rhyme that carries through lines one and three of each tercet, plus lines one, three, and four in the final quatrain. There is a second end rhyme that carries through the middle line of each tercet, plus line two in the final quatrain.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” might be my personal favorite villanelle, but the most famous poem written in the form is likely Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” with its two refrains: “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

The multiple repetitions and the circular nature of the villanelle make it a good form for poems that grapple with an insistent memory, an unresolved emotion, or a feeling of being trapped. But the form can be a container for any kind of subject matter in which repetition feels essential. So much of life is repetition, after all, isn’t it? We perform the same actions again and again, day after day. This might sound mundane, but when repetition is reverent, it also forms rituals — repetitions which give our lives meaning.

Today’s poem is a villanelle, and its use of the word “circuit” makes the repetition especially apropos.

Return Path
by Lesley Wheeler

The only way to pray is through my feet,
earthward, jolted in return by the fizz
of a spiking current. I never thought a circuit

would loop through me, believed I was separate,
alone, done with gods, but here it is:
I’ve found a way to pray. Through my feet,

I reach down. There’s something animate,
mycelial, that touches me back. It’s a species
of love, a thinking-spike, a zinging circuit

of energy and dirt, blood and spirit—
plutonic conversation, mostly wordless.
The way I’ve found to pray is through my feet,

sole bared to wooden boards, or rug, or slate,
or buggy grass, just as you want to press
skin to a beloved’s, sparking a current, a circuit.

Not that earth loves me, exactly. Matter’s what
matters. She wants me to return the mess
of my only body, pray from head through feet
as I sink, unthinking ash, into love’s circuit.

“Return Path” by Lesley Wheeler from MYCOCOSMIC © 2025 Lesley Wheeler. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Tupelo Press.