Villanelle
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A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lin
A classic pastoral scene, depicting a shepherd with his livestock; a pastoral subject was the initial distinguishing feature of the villanelle. Painting by Ferdinand Chaigneau [fr], 19th century.
Pastoral
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The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availabili
Villanelle
…villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral. The form started as a simple ballad-like song with no fixed form; this fixed quality would only come much later, from the poem "Villanelle (J'ay perdu…
Francois Boucher, Daphnis and Chloe, 1743, based on the Hellenistic pastoral novel
The Young Shepherd, engraving using stipple technique, by Giulio Campagnola, c. 1510
Georgics Book III, Shepherd with Flocks, Virgil (Vatican Library)
Romantic artist, illustrator and poet William Blake's hand painted print illustrating his pastoral poem "The Shepherd" depicts the pastoral scene of a shepherd watching his flock with a shepherd's crook. This image represents copy B, printed and painted in 1789, now in Library of Congress.