“The House on the Hill” as found in The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature was written by Edwin Arlington Robinson and is a poem written in the form of villanelle. A vilanelle is structured as a fixed form with nineteen lines at any length split in to six stanzas. There are five tercets and a conclusion as a quatrain. The first and third lines of the villanelle rhyme and are repeated in every tercet as well as being the final two lines of the quatrain. This specific poem repeats the lines “They are all gone away” (1), and “There is nothing more to say” (3). These lines are very important, and although they stay the same throughout, their meaning is dependent on which stanza they are found within. The repeated lines are analogous of
