Villanelle

Elizabeth Lewis’s “Villanelle” is based on a poem of the same name by Earle Birney, one of Canada’s best-known poets. In a live action segment preceding the animation, Birney introduces the poem, describing the circumstances that led him to write it. He tells of how he spent one summer of the 1960s at Bowen island, north of Vancouver. During the week he was alone. But on the week-ends, friends and students would join him. Only one of those friends, a promising young student named Betty Lamert, was able to join him on his two-mile swims in the icy bay water. On the one weekend she didn’t show up, Birney wrote “Villanelle,” knowing that she liked that particular form of lyrical poem. Unfortunately, they never saw each other again. The poet later learned of his former student’s growing success as a nationally known dramatist and then of her untimely death. “Villanelle” then became her elegy.