When family turmoil upset my brother, he started stringing lacrosse heads. He spent hours on YouTube, learning the different ways of lacing intricate patterns in order to create different effects. Sometimes he would venture from his room to show me something: “Look at how tight I got the channel! And how little whip!”

    I had no clue what he was talking about; I don’t play lacrosse. But I did admire his work. He needed the structure of the craft, something that made perfect, objective sense, while our parents worked out their divorce.

    It’s popular to dismiss poetic form as a word game. Everyone has heard the poet who “doesn’t like to be constrained by form.” And if these people don’t like things as simple as ballad meter, they’ll certainly laugh at the villanelle with its "five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas." Oh, and don’t forget that "these two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain." But villanelles aren’t word games. Or at least, they don’t have to be.

    Dylan Thomas demonstrates this with his poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” From the poem’s prose meaning, readers gather that the speaker is struggling with his father’s imminent death. The speaker grieves his 'father, there on the sad height'. But that’s the only time he explicitly mentions his father. During the first five stanzas, he speaks quite generally about, in turn, "wise men,' 'Good men,' 'Wild men' and 'Grave men.' Yet readers still feel the intensity of the speaker’s emotions. And this is where the form comes in. The villanelle’s refrains, 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light,' strike readers at least every three lines in this 19 line poem. The repetition lets the speaker’s passion seep through every stanza as he tries to show his father all these different types of men that refuse to die. The speaker is desperate. Of course this argument won’t convince his father to live, but it’s what the speaker needs to do to deal with his father’s death, and no one can blame him.

    But why did it have to be a villanelle specifically? Couldn’t any poem just repeat lines? This is where you kind of have to be a lacrosse player to appreciate the lacrosse head. In the same way that I couldn’t understand my brother’s craft, it might be difficult for someone unfamiliar with poetry to see exactly what Thomas was doing with this poem.

    The villanelle is a rigid form; there’s no doubt about that. But Thomas used that to convey something rather specific about his speaker’s grief. The form has structure, explicit rules and repetition. In a sense, there’s an objective way to write a good villanelle: Just follow the rules. And for the speaker, someone experiencing vicious emotional turmoil, this is the perfect form. The speaker finds himself on the brink of being thrust into a world without his father; he is frightened and bewildered. So he clings to something that makes sense: the villanelle. To prevent his expression from being an incomprehensible cry, Thomas’s speaker copes with his father’s death with the controlled yet desperate villanelle.

    For me, reading this poem is like watching my brother work at one of his lacrosse heads, methodically stringing leather through small holes under a furrowed brow.