The villanelle is a dainty thing, you bet: It's about as artificial and affected as poetic forms get, but in the right hands (William Ernest Henley above got away with it), it's a fine thing -- and a writer like Dylan Thomas can even get the real deep rumble in it, when he's in top form.
But oh, I'm not here to tell you about good poets. I'm here to tell you about a lousy one, James Joyce, a man who showed good judgement in turning to prose.
Joyce gives us this villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by way of showing just how pretentious and annoying that Young Man was:
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.
And still you hold our longing gaze
With langorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
The repetition saves a lot of typing. The Mass imagery is a bit weird, and the conflation of the BVM with the love object is downright peculiar. Well, we were all young once.