Like the sun, vanishing into the night

Like the sun, vanishing into the night

Upon the flames of dreams of yesterday

I am forever, fading, from the light

~

My heart filled with the shadows of twilight

Is breaking apart, a crumbling bouquet

Like the sun, vanishing into the night

~

Leaves are falling, red bleeding into white

As shadowless dusk, gently steals the day

I am forever, fading, from the light

~

The wings of mourning doves, whistle in flight

Gradually melting into the grey

Like the sun, vanishing into the night

~

I recall when the flames of love burned bright

But now, as the brush of night paints the way

I am forever, fading, from the light

~

In quiet melancholy of hindsight

Turning to darkness and drifting away

Like the sun, vanishing into the night

I am forever, fading, from the light

 

© Ann Bagnall 2020.

This poem is a villanelle. A villanelle is a poetic form with nineteen lines and a strict pattern of repetition and a rhyme scheme. Each villanelle is comprised of five tercets (i.e., a three-line stanza) followed by one quatrain (a stanza with four lines). The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated in an alternating pattern as the final line of each next tercet; those two repeated lines then form the final two lines of the entire poem. The rhyme scheme calls for those repeating lines to rhyme, and for the second line of every tercet to rhyme.

Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a villanelle example, and the lines that he repeats in the poem are quite famous:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.