Villanelle Quotes

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) --from "Mad Girl's Love Song: A Villanelle", written 1954

Are you not weary of ardent ways? Tell no more of enchanted days.

Without predators, people who can think the unthinkable, and act without fear or hesitation, the world stands still. You are an evolutionary necessity.

I sat down and got out my current project, an extremely bad villanelle in which I was carefully avoiding the word pestilence, which was trying so hard to shove its way into every stanza that I was sure that if I actually wrote it down, the whole thing would turn into a tidy evocation of a new plague. I’m probably the only student who tries to prevent my writing assignments from turning into new spells.

Villanelle for my valentine Old love, I thought I'd never see the time because of all we've done and often said when I'd be yours, my dear, and you'd be mine. And what relief to soften, and resign the battle of the heart over the head. old love, I thought I'd never see the time when qualms and cold feet that could undermine all we've held out for, dissipate instead now that I'm yours, my dear and you are mine. I'm still amazed how our two lives align the two of us! A pair! Take it as read, old love, I thought I'd never see the time The tangle of our jumpers in the line, the battle for the blankets in our bed confirm that I am yours, and you are mine. So then, this is my pledge, my valentine: my hand's in yours for all that lies ahead. Oh love, there's never been a better time now that I'm yours, and finally, you're mine.

In silence lies safety.

Villanelle - Roland Leighton Violets from Plug Street Wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head; It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood- Think what they have meant to me- Life and Hope and Love and You (And you did not see them grow Where his mangled body lay Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so.) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land These I send in memory, Knowing you will understand.

Speedboats, made-up aristocratic titles, exploding dildos… You’re not living in a fucking TV series, Villanelle.

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

have so many merry little pots bubbling away in the fire of my enthusiasm: Myron, future trips, modern poetry, Yeats, Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal—even if rejections are immanent), spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential.

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying, Then I feel if I don't, I'll go insane. It can seem her whole life was her dying. She tried so hard, then she tired of trying; Now I'm tired, too, of trying to explain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. The anxiety, the rage, the denying; Though I never blamed her for my pain, It can seem her whole life was her dying. And mine was struggling to save her; prying, Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. If I said she was easy, I'd be lying; The lens between her and the world was stained: It can seem her whole life was her dying. But the fact, the fact, is stupefying: Her absence tears at me like a chain. Sometimes I almost go hours without crying. It can seem her whole life was her dying. - Villanelle for a Suicide's Mother

Oxana had never felt the slightest need to be liked, but it gave her profound satisfaction to be desired.

Villanelle It is the pain, it is the pain endures. Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. What later purge from this deep toxin cures? What kindness now could the old salve renew? It is the pain, it is the pain endures. The infection slept (custom or changes inures) And when pain's secondary phase was due Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. How safe I felt, whom memory assures, Rich that your grace safely by heart I knew. It is the pain, it is the pain endures. My stare drank deep beauty that still allures. My heart pumps yet the poison draught of you. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours. You are still kind whom the same shape immures. Kind and beyond adieu. We miss our cue. It is the pain, it is the pain endures. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.

He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declaration veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or jonquils, nor haunted a mailbox or a phone booth or a certain café, nor screamed his beloved's name in the streets at three in the morning, heedless of the neighbors.

Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.

[Genre is] like working in any form—in poetry, for example. When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always—I think any poet who’s worked in form will agree with me—is that the form leads you to what you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious.

Dragon-fruit Martini in hand, Simon makes his way towards one of the Star Bar’s few unoccupied seats, which appears to be upholstered in zebra-skin. “Boss Ass Bitch” by Nicki Minaj is pumping from concealed speakers,

Someone who could get up in the morning, make coffee, choose what to wear, and then go out and cold-bloodedly put a total stranger to death. Did you have to be some kind of anomalous, psychopathic freak to do that? Did you have to be born that way? Or could any woman, correctly programmed, be turned into a professional executioner?

With her make-up-free complexion and nondescript brown hair gathered in a scrappy up-do, she looks like someone for whom there are more important things than being thought pretty. She might be an academic, or an assistant in the better sort of a bookshop. But there's something about her—a stillness, a fixity of gaze—that tells another story.

shufti.

I really really don't want to die here, among these criminally ugly furnishings.

For Villanelle, language is fluid. Most of the time she thinks in French, but every so often she awakes and knows that she’s been dreaming in Russian. At times, close to sleep, the blood roars in her ears, an unstoppable tide shot through with polyglot screams. On such occasions, alone in the Paris apartment, she anaesthetises herself with hours of web-surfing, usually in English. And now, she notes, she is mentally playing out scenarios in Sicilian-inflected Italian. She hasn’t sought out the language, but her head echoes with it. Is there any part of her that is still Oxana Vorontsova? Does she still exist, that little girl who lay night after night in urine-sodden sheets at the orphanage, planning her revenge? Or was there only ever Villanelle, evolution’s chosen instrument?

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages. And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti’s poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note was struck by Theophile Gautier’s advice to the young poet to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet’s reading.

Most of the time, most days, I feel nothing. I don’t feel anything. It is so boring. I wake up, and I think, again, really? I have to do this again? And what I really don’t understand is how come everyone else isn’t screaming with boredom, too.

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

O where will you go when the blinding flash Scatters the seed of a million suns? And what will you do in the rain of ash? I'll draw the blinds and pull down the sash, And hide from the sight of so many noons. But how will it be when the blinding flash Disturbs your body's close-knit mesh Bringing to light your lovely bones? What will you wear in the rain of ash? I will go bare without my flesh, My vertebrae will click like stones. Ah. But where will you dance when the blinding flash Settles the city in a holy hush? I will dance alone among the ruins. Ah. And what will you say to the rain of ash? I will be charming. My subtle speech Will weave close turns and counter-turns- No. What will you say to the rain of ash? Nothing, after the blinding flash - Terminal Colloquy

This is not a barren place. Villanelle, whose talent is to look at everything at least twice, taught me to find joy in the most unlikely places and still to be surprised by the obvious. She had a knack of raising your spirits just by saying, 'Look at that,' and that was always an ordinary treasure brought to life. She can even charm the fishwives. So I go from my room in the morning and make the journey to the garden very slowly, feeling the walls with my hands, getting a sense of surface, of texture. I breathe carefully, smelling the air, and when the sun is up I turn my face that way and let it lighten me. . . . At the garden, although I have a spade and a fork, I often dig with my hands if it’s not too cold. I like to feel the earth, to squeeze it hard and tight or to crumble it between my fingers. There's time here to love slowly.

Suddenly, he wanted some credit for it. He wanted someone to thank him for not crapping on the institution of love. He wanted someone to thank him for not being yet another dilettante. He wanted someone to thank him for quitting poetry. He wanted some great poet to thank him for quitting poetry instead of desecrating it with his amateurishness. He wanted some unborn child to thank him for not conceiving her and not leaving her a hope chest full of mawkish villanelles. He wanted some sort of organization of martyrs to give him an award. He wanted to be decorated for not putting up a fuss. He wanted to be the president of forgettable people. He wanted there to be a competition for the least competitive person, and he wanted to win that competition. He wanted some sort of badge or outfit or medal or key or hat. He wanted to be asked to stand. He wanted to be considered. He wanted to be considered in earnest before being ignored. He wanted all the insane and beautiful and passionate people in the world to take one moment of silence in gratitude for the ones who had ceded them the stage-- he, the unread poet, the sacrifice, the schoolteacher-- he wanted one goddamned moment of appreciation.

If it was poetry, it shifted from villanelle to free verse with abandon, from couplets to quatrains with no thought. But it was not poetry. If it was music, it married major and minor keys without concern for time or meter. But it was not music. If it was story, characters lived without dying and died without living; worlds without purpose became metaphors that devoured themselves. But it was not story. Kindred and Scindapse mumbled and hummed and shouted and cackled and sang and spoke and whispered nonsense to the fire in an oft-broken, pitched stream. And the fire, like a lock finally greeted by the right key, opened.

Lavez, lavez, ô Pluies ! les hautes tables de mémoire.« Ô pluies ! lavez au cœur de l’homme les plus beaux dits de l’homme : les plus belles sentences, les plus belles séquences ; les phrases les mieux faites, les pages les mieux nées. Lavez, lavez, au cœur des hommes, leur goût de cantilènes, d’élégies ; leur goût de villanelles et de rondeaux ; leurs grands bonheurs d’expression ; lavez le sel de l’atticisme et le miel de l’euphuisme, lavez, lavez la literie du songe et la litière du savoir : au cœur de l’homme sans refus, au cœur de l’homme sans dégoût, lavez, lavez, ô Pluies ! les plus beaux dons de l’homme… au cœur des hommes les mieux doués pour les grandes œuvres de raison.

Questo racconto apparirà al lettore straniero, che lo leggerà per primo, in stridente contrasto con la immagine pittoresca che dell’Italia meridionale egli trova frequentemente nella letteratura per turisti. In certi libri, com’è noto, l’Italia meridionale è una terra bellissima, in cui i contadini vanno al lavoro cantando cori di gioia, cui rispondono cori di villanelle abbigliate nei tradizionali costumi, mentre nel bosco vicino gorgheggiano gli usignoli. Purtroppo, a Fontamara, queste meraviglie non sono mai successe. I Fontamaresi vestono come i poveracci di tutte le contrade del mondo. E a Fontamara non c’è bosco: la montagna è arida, brulla, come la maggior parte dell’Appennino. Gli uccelli sono pochi e paurosi, per la caccia spietata che a essi si fa. Non c’è usignolo; nel dialetto non c’è neppure la parola per designarlo. I contadini non cantano, né in coro, né a soli; neppure quando sono ubriachi, tanto meno (e si capisce) andando al lavoro. Invece di cantare, volentieri bestemmiano. Per esprimere una grande emozione, la gioia, l’ira, e perfino la devozione religiosa, bestemmiano. Ma neppure nel bestemmiare portano molta fantasia e se la prendono sempre contro due tre santi di loro conoscenza, li mannaggiano sempre con le stesse rozze parolacce.

ليتني شجرةٌ، لا أغادر بيتي وراء الأحبة إذ يرحلونْ... كلما حفر الناس صدري بأسمائهم، قلت: لا بأس أن يجرٓحٓ العاشقونْ...

لا تقترب من كثيراً... ابتعدْ حتى أراك...

والآن‎ في فصل الحنينِ وحين يعرى حزن أيلول ‎ لأنسام الشتاءْ ‎ ينتابني وجعٌ وأسئلةٌ لماذا الحزن مع عين السماءْ؟ ‎ ولأيّ قلبٍ كلّما انهمرت سماءٌ ‎ فوق أرضٍ ‎أشتهي حبّاً مضى... ‎ وتفوحُ رائحةُ النساءْ…

الساكنون بهذا القلب قد عرفوا أن السعادة لا تعني سوى الأملِ… كل البلاد سجونٌ غير آمنةٍ… إلا متى وجه مَن في البال، يضحك لي!

لم يكن لنا أجنحة، فاعتمدنا الخيال وسيلة للسفر... لم يكن لنا هوية، فحفرنا ملامحنا في الحجر... لم يكن لنا وطن، فصرنا نقلّد حيث نقيم خصال الشجر…

لك الحمد يا إلهي على الابتلاء قبل العطاء… على المرض قبل الشفاء، على البيت والعراء..فلولا انكسار البيت لما دخلت علينا … السماء بنجومها

أجمل تجليات الله، قلوب العاشقين… وأجمل تجليات العشق، عيون المؤمنين… هنا حيث العشق إيمان، والحجر كالشجر، والكلام كالسلام، يجد الشعر الضوء ليخرج بانسيابية من بين أنامل الأطفال وكسور الأفئدة…

لَكِ فُسْحَةٌ كُبْرى بِذاكِرَتي ‎فَتَحَفَّظي, أَرْجوكِ سَيّدَتي ‎لا تاجَ عِنْدي...لا قصور معي... ‎حَتّى تَكوني أَنْتِ مَمْلَكَتي ‎لا تُجْهِدي عَيْنَيْكِ بي فَأَنا ‎رَجُلٌ جِراحاتُ الهَوى لُغَتي ‎أُشْفى مِنِ امْرَأَةٍ بِإِمْرَأَةٍ ‎فَأَحُلُّ مُشْكِلَتي بِمُشْكِلَةِ…

كل صباح أرفع كوب الماء، وأتركه. ‎هكذا أطمئن إلى أن العالم لم يتغير، وقوانينه ما زالت تعمل...

لأنك أمعنت شكاً وظنّا سأذكر أجمل ما كان منا وأمضي، فلا البحر ضمّ الشراع ولا الريح سارت كما نتمنى وما دمت لا تطمئن بقربي سأرحل عنك لكي تطمئنا...

بناء العقلية المتكاملة بين العلم والفن والرياضيات والهندسة والتكنولوجيا هو جل ما أسعى للوصول إليه… لا يمكن للمرء أن يستمر بالابداع اذا أطال الوقوف أمام حرم واحد للجمال…