What formal feature best describes Roethke's The Waking?

• A. It uses free verse with irregular rhythm and no refrains.
• B. It is a 14-line sonnet with a strict rhyme scheme.
• C. It is organized as alternating quatrains and couplets.
• D. It is a 19-line villanelle with two refrains repeated throughout.

Answer: (D)

Roethke’s The Waking is built on a fixed verse form: the villanelle. A villanelle has 19 lines arranged as five tercets followed by a four-line ending, with two lines from the opening tercet repeating as refrains through the poem. Those two refrains recur at the end of each tercet and appear again in the final quatrain, creating a musical, insistently circular cadence. That repetition emphasizes the speaker’s process of waking, learning, and discovering—thoughts and observations echoing back on themselves until they feel embedded in the speaker’s experience. This structure—nineteen precisely arranged lines with two refrains woven throughout—best describes the poem. It wouldn’t fit free verse, a 14-line sonnet, or alternating quatrains and couplets, because those forms lack the fixed repetition and specific line-count pattern that define a villanelle.