Take (your) Heart

If home is where our hearts reside,
Where life sits still on windowsills,
Then where’s the heart when home has died?

Our lives are cattle, roped and tied;
Our souls the reaper’s larder fills,
If home is where our hearts reside.

When winter’s wasting winds decide
To blow through walls and bring in ills,
Then where’s the heart when home has died?

The heart from hearth must be untied
Before the rime of time it kills,
If home is where our hearts reside.

If heart’s own home life’s winds divide
And fling the bits in frozen hills,
Then where’s the heart when home has died?

Heart’s death decaying dreams belied;
Now withered souls go where they will.
If home is where our hearts reside,
Then where’s the home when heart has died?

(C)2009, Andrew Kerstetter

I wrote this villanelle upon reflection of the old saying "home is where the heart is." Being at college, I feel like my home is here; this is where I work and play and eat and talk and learn and sleep. But then summer comes, or Christmas break, or Spring break, and suddenly this place is closed to me. I have to go "home" to my parents' house, in the place where I grew up. Now don't get me wrong, I love going home to see my family and old friends, but that place feels small now. It's not really my home anymore. The question is: if home is where the heart is, then where is my heart when no place really feels like home?

This poem explores two ideas: one, that you can't leave your heart at home, in one place, for too long, or life will slow down and stagnate. Or if something happens to displace you from your home--going to college, or losing the home in a fire or something--then what do you do? Also, in the end, I took that idea a step further. Basically in the end I stated my belief through this poem that it's better to take your heart and find a new home when the old one is gone, instead of going about life taking the idea of 'home' for granted, and when the home is suddenly gone (figuratively and/or literally) having your heard be 'killed' alongside it.


I like the poem overall; I think it flows well, and I think the ideas are there but aren't too obvious. The trouble came with the "ills" rhyme. It was devilishly difficult to find words that rhymed like that and still fit into the poem. My least favorite part is "bring in ills," but I couldn't think of a different way of saying that. Maybe sometime in the future I'll change that line to something else that sounds better but still gets the idea across; for now, I'll have to leave it.

I like this poem because, of all the poems I've done recently, I think I did the best job of sticking to the iambic. I wrote this in iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter. I can't really explain my reasoning, other than for this kind of musical poetry I think it sounds better; more concise, I suppose. 2 more syllables per line might have sounded like a stretch, and if I would have done pentameter, the extra 2 syllables would either have been superfluous adjectives/adverbs, or unnecessary words that would have broken the clean iambic.

The villanelle is definitely a form that you either love or you hate. I love it because I love music--I've been playing the trumpet for over 12 years now--and when a villanelle is written right, it sounds lovely and flowing. Some people hate it because it's so rigid, and they think the repeated rhyme scheme is an awful, grinding sound. I can see where they're coming from, but perhaps if they try to read some famous villanelles like this one by W.H. Auden, or Edwin Arlington Robinson's The House on the Hill which is one of my favorites, maybe they would appreciate it more.

A lot of well-known and respected American poets have written villanelles, so the merits of the form have been proven. It depends on what a poet does with that form, what emotions and truths he or she puts in the slots, whether it will be a good poem or not. Is my poem here good? Well, I don't know. I think it was a good *attempt* at a villanelle, but in the end, it's not up to me whether anything I do is "good" or not.