I haven't looked at Susan's villanelle yet, though I will, when I get out from under some paper here. By emphatic meter, I didn't mean regular meter, I meant strong meter. Some villanelles have worked with fascinating but selective variations in their refrains, some have used enjambments skillfully, some have made good use of metrical substitutions, but it seems to me that the ones that work all announce the form boldly and don't try too hard to hide it. Some very great sonnets might well hide the fact that they're sonnets to all but the most trained ear, but I think the villanelle is a form in which one can cross a line and create so many variations that the form itself breaks down--I see this in some student villanelles, anyway.
To demonstrate my point about each form having strengths and limitations, consider the sestina for a moment: it's overused, but I still feel delight when I run across a good one. What happens to most students is this: they think, Ah, an easy form, no absolute demand in terms of meter and no rhyme, all I gotta do is repeat these six words and it's only 39 lines long. Well, it turns out that 39 lines is a long time to sustain a lyric, and I can depend on seeing most student sestinas bog down in about the fourth stanza. They get wordy and they don't do anything new. One of my brighter students just turned in a very good one that was saved because she began the fourth stanza with the word "But" and made a sort of turn in the poem--she saw the problem of sustaining her course any further in one direction, and she changed tack.
In the villanelle, since you're repeating the two lines, there's a huge danger that you'll just say the same things over and over again. That's why the best of them change the magnitude of their subject along the way, or increase the emotional or intellectual stakes in some way. The form has a built-in weakness that you have to overcome. That's part of mastering it. Again, I say this as one who has never mastered it, never written a good villanelle--or sestina, for that matter....
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