After reviewing the style of the villanelle (a style so obscure that it merits red squigglies under its name) I have determined that while "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas is most accurate in terms of villanelle style, Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" is the more effective form.
Roethke's poem is quite complex and draws on a series of paradoxes to get his point across. For instance, the first line says "I wake to sleep". What does he mean by that? Susan Pinkus asserts that sleep is "the state the poet must reach to awake and discover the acceptance" that eventually all of us will die. In the second stanza, Roethke says "I hear my being dance from ear to ear" as if his life is a happy dance, even though he knows that it will one day end. Roethke also writes "God bless the Ground" and "Great Nature has another thing to do", meaning that these other realms that we will visit when we perish offer another level of enlightenment. Roethke asserts that by "waking to sleep" and "learning by going where I have to go", we must all die in the end, but we should not be saddened by this because there are greater things in the after life. This makes life and death a circle, as created by the paradoxes. The continual use of paradoxes creates a circular nature in the poem itself. That coupled with the villanelle style of repetition makes the whole thing one big circle.
Roethke's "The Waking" uses paradoxes to create a circular motion to life and death that tells the audience to not be afraid of death, but to welcome it as another period of enlightenment. This makes a truly circular villanelle and lets it triumph over the other poems in terms of effectiveness.
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