A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with a repeating refrain. Give us a subject, four adjectives and two names, and we will write the villanelle for you.
A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem built from five tercets and a closing quatrain, with two refrains and only two rhyme sounds: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2. In practice that means line one (the first refrain, A1) is repeated at the end of tercets two and four and as the third-to-last line of the quatrain; line three (A2) is repeated at the end of tercets three and five and as the final line. Five of the nineteen lines are therefore repeats.
The repetition is the form's entire subject. Because the two refrains come back five times, their meaning has to shift each time they appear — the same words, a different sense. That pressure is why villanelles tend to be about obsession, return, grief, or anything that will not leave you alone. The most famous modern example in English is Dylan Thomas's Do not go gentle into that good night (1951), which uses the form's repetitions to build a growing urgency.
The repeating skeleton, which is what you should draft before writing any other line:
Tercet 1: A1 / b / A2
Tercet 2: a / b / A1
Tercet 3: a / b / A2
Tercet 4: a / b / A1
Tercet 5: a / b / A2
Quatrain: a / b / A1 / A2
Choose A1 and A2 with enormous care: they are the two lines that must survive being read five times, so they need to be plain enough to bear repetition and suggestive enough to mean something different on the last outing. A workable pair is something like “The harbour keeps the promise of the light” and “and evening folds the water into song”. There are only two rhyme families in the whole poem, and the A family must serve both refrains — light / night / white — while the b family carries the six middle lines. Count the available rhymes before you commit; a villanelle with a thin rhyme family cannot be finished.
This page composes nineteen lines in five tercets and a closing quatrain, with two rhyme families and two refrains. Line one returns as lines 6, 12 and 18, and line three returns as lines 9, 15 and 19 — the standard villanelle pattern. The pairs of rhyme words come from the site's rhyme table, so the refrains and the five middle a lines really do rhyme.
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