One thought on “I love you, ok, byebye”

1. Analysis

   1. The Poem’s Form

   The villanelle runs nineteen lines: five tercets and a quatrain, rhyming ABA and then ABAA. Two rhyme sounds carry the whole poem, one landing seven times and the other six, with nowhere to hide a weak rhyme. Two refrains, fixed as lines one and three of the opening tercet, alternate at the end of each following tercet and then arrive together to close the quatrain — which puts eight of the nineteen lines beyond further control once the first stanza is set. The form’s real subject is what a repeated sentence comes to mean as the material around it changes.

   The pictogram above the poem is a graphical depiction of the form of a standard villanelle.

   Here the A rhyme is die / byebye / eye / defy / why / dry / by and the B rhyme is dead / unsaid / dread / tread / instead / led. The refrains are To live like children until we die and I’ll love you until then, ok, byebye.

   To that inherited machinery the author adds five rules:

   Every A line alludes to a famous villanelle.
   Every B line is exactly ten syllables.
   Every B line contains a three-word alliteration.
   Every B line uses the style, mood or word choice of the referenced villanelle.
   Every B line unifies the reference in the A line with the poem’s thematic centre.

   These compound rather than add. One B line has to hit ten syllables exactly, land a three-word alliteration, sound like a specific dead poet, rhyme on a sound already used several times, and fold that poet into the poem’s own position — six times over, on a single rhyme. The A lines have their own version: each must be a recognisable quotation and still read as plain English. No poet and no title is named anywhere in the nineteen lines, so every reference is carried by the words themselves rather than announced.

   That is where the central irony sits, and it is load-bearing rather than decorative. The poem argues for freedom from restriction — play, appetite, the unplanned life — and delivers the argument through the least free thing available, tightened by rules nobody required and executed without visible strain. Anyone can recommend looseness loosely. The discipline is the evidence that the abandon being described is a chosen stance rather than an absence of rigour.

   The first of those rules is worth dwelling on, because it makes the poem allusive by design. The opening stanza sets out its own position plainly before any of the borrowing starts. However, every A line after the opening stanza reaches outside itself and leans on a different well-known villanelle, and the borrowings arrive in a deliberate order chosen by the author.

   2. The Referenced Villanelles

   Mad Girl’s Love Song — Sylvia Plath

   The mind as sole author of reality: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead,” and, muttered in parentheses, “(I think I made you up inside my head.)” A lover sang her moon-struck, kissed her quite insane, and left, and she cannot establish that he existed. Love is overwhelming as sensation and unverifiable as fact; death is trivially available and entirely hers, a matter of closing her eyes. The shared theme of time running out appears here as a memory decaying while she watches it go.

   Do not go gentle into that good night — Dylan Thomas

   Refusal, spoken over a dying father. Wise, good, wild and grave men all rage at the end, and the last stanza asks the father to curse and bless his son with fierce tears. Love is never named and arrives as volume — any response beats the gentleness of going quietly. Death is an enemy with a light to be fought over, resisted on principle even though Thomas knows the resistance changes nothing. Time running out is a deadline measured in a single night.

   If I Could Tell You — W. H. Auden

   The unavailability of explanation. “Time will say nothing but I told you so” gives the only speaking part to an authority whose one remark arrives too late to help, and “If I could tell you I would let you know” is a promise built to fail. Love is real, felt, and outside language; the reticence is the subject rather than coldness. Death is folded into the general category of things time declines to justify. Time running out is personified as the only speaker, and the winner.

   Missing Dates — William Empson

   Accumulation. What kills is residue rather than event — the dates unkept, the life unused — and the case is argued through clinical material: tombs and slag hills usurping the soil, an old dog bled dry so young dog blood could be pumped in, buying “but a month’s desires.” Love is absent; there is no second person anywhere in the poem. Death is arithmetic, slow and self-administered, with no procedure available to top a life back up. Time running out is a total rather than a deadline.

   The Waking — Theodore Roethke

   Motion without a map: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.” Love is diffuse and attentive, closer to a relation with the world than with one person, and shows up as steadiness rather than intensity. Death is the calmest of the five — “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear” — with fear removed rather than overcome. Time running out is a shape to move within.

   All five use the villanelle’s compulsory return to circle a mortal fact that repetition cannot wear down. Only the posture differs: invent it, fight it, fall silent before it, tally it, or walk into it.

   3. The First Stanza — The Thematic Core

   To live like children until we die
   We will learn, love and laugh then poof, we’re dead
   I’ll love you until then, ok, byebye

   This is the only stanza that borrows nothing. It speaks in the poem’s own voice, unmediated by anyone else’s, and everything the following five stanzas do is measured against the ground it lays down.

   A1 states the programme: “To live like children until we die.” Both halves carry weight. The manner is childhood, and the term is mortality, and the word joining them is “until” rather than “before” or “despite.” That makes the childishness conditional on death instead of opposed to it. The proposal is not to forget that the end is coming but to behave a particular way in full knowledge of it.

   A2 states the address: “I’ll love you until then, ok, byebye.” The same deadline returns, now attached to love and to a second person who has not been introduced and does not need to be. Between them the two refrains contain the entire poem — a way to live and somebody to live it with, both bounded by the same clock. And the sign-off does its own work: “ok, byebye” is what a child says leaving a room and also the last thing anybody says, the flippant and the mortal placed side by side with no attempt to rank them.

   The B line sets the template the rest of the poem follows. “We will learn, love and laugh” is a three-word alliteration on l, three verbs in a row, playful in exactly the nursery-rhyme way that alliteration itself is a child’s pleasure — so the device announces the argument before any of the argument has been made. Then the line breaks in half: a whole life in the first six syllables, its end in the last four, hinged on “poof,” a nursery word doing the work of dying. Every later B line inherits both templates, the sonic one and the tonal one.

   4. The Remaining Stanzas

   Stanza 2 — Mad Girl’s Love Song, Sylvia Plath

   Kiss me quite insane, through a Mad Girl’s eye
   Wild wanton wanting, no desire unsaid
   To live like children until we die

   Plath’s poem is solipsistic in the strict sense. World and lover exist only while she attends to them, and the parenthetical refrain keeps conceding she may have invented him.

   The A line lifts “kissed me quite insane” from “And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane,” while “a Mad Girl’s eye” points at the title without quoting it. The echo is more than verbal: her phrase sits in a stanza of hallucinatory extravagance, and the line holds that pitch. Nobody speaks this way except at full volume.

   What the speaker does with her is convert past tense into imperative and solitude into company. Her madness was the proof that nothing was there; “kiss me” needs a second person who can comply. The licence to be extravagant is kept and the isolation discarded.

   The B line imports her appetite through the w-alliteration of “Wild wanton wanting,” then reverses her with “no desire unsaid.” Her wanting stayed inside her head, unspoken and unverifiable. Here nothing goes unsaid, which is the thematic centre exactly: children want out loud, with no gap between the feeling and the announcement.

   The refrain, arriving straight after an erotic demand, cannot mean innocence. Children means mode — unhedged, unembarrassed, saying the thing. It also bounds the Plath material: her madness had no edges because nothing in her poem was reliably real, while this one ends at a fixed point.

   Stanza 3 — Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas

   Old age should burn, rave and defy
   Play, love full to the end, deny death’s dread
   I’ll love you until then, ok, byebye

   Thomas’s villanelle is the loudest refusal in the tradition, spoken to a dying father, with love arriving as rage because rage is the only register the poem permits.

   The A line near-quotes “Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” and the substitution does the work: dropping “at close of day” for “and defy” pulls “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” into the same line, so one borrowed phrase carries both of his refrains. His manner comes with it — imperatives, short hard verbs, three stressed actions in a row, nothing softened.

   What the speaker is saying against him is that the defiance can keep its shape and change its object. Thomas’s version requires an enemy and costs him enormously to sustain. This stanza aims the same burning and raving at play, removing the enemy without losing the energy.

   The B line alliterates on the d Thomas built his own poem from — dying, dark, good night — so the ear registers him at once. Then the object of denial gives the game away. It is not death being denied, which would be a lie, but dread: the anticipatory flinch that ruins the last stretch before anything has happened. Children carry the same mortality without it.

   The refrain is almost impudent against father-son fury. Thomas would not tolerate “ok, byebye” within a mile of a deathbed. His defiance survives the translation; his anguish does not.

   Stanza 4 — If I Could Tell You, W. H. Auden

   If I could tell you love has no why
   We’ll ignore time’s tortured toll, endless tread
   To live like children until we die

   Auden’s poem is about knowledge that never arrives: an indifferent authority with one unhelpful remark, and a refrain promising disclosure in a form that guarantees none.

   The A line takes his conditional and completes it, supplying the content he never delivers. The subjunctive and the flat understatement are his, so the line sounds like Auden while doing the one thing Auden would not do.

   What the speaker is saying against him is that the withheld answer, once produced, turns out to be an absence — and that this is a relief rather than a loss. His silence implies the explanation would console if it could be spoken. The stanza’s position is that love without a reason cannot be argued away, since there is no premise underneath for anyone to attack.

   The B line runs on t-alliteration and on Auden’s own figure for time. “Time’s tortured toll” makes time a creditor keeping score; “endless tread” makes it a marcher that never breaks step. What is offered against them is not stopping the count, which is impossible, but simply not listening to it. The verb matters here. Fighting time would be Thomas’s answer, already given and already declined one stanza earlier, and the poem does not repeat it. Ignoring is the child’s answer instead: no sense of a balance accruing, because no attention is being paid to the ledger at all.

   The refrain then answers his suspended sentence. The reason cannot be told because there is not one, so the sane response is to live as though the question never came up. Auden’s adults are stuck knowing they cannot explain themselves; the refrain proposes people who never needed to.

   Stanza 5 — Missing Dates, William Empson

   Slowly the poison bled an old dog dry
   So senseless, silly, love fully instead
   I’ll love you until then, ok, byebye

   Empson’s villanelle offers nothing: a life filling with what was never used, no exit, no beloved, no remedy.

   The A line welds two moments of his together. “Slowly the poison” opens his refrain verbatim; “bled an old dog dry” comes from the transfusion stanza in which young dog blood buys a month’s desires. Two lines from different parts of the poem are fused into one ten-syllable sentence that reads as though it had always been one. The manner is his — flat, clinical, reporting an atrocity without adjusting tone. It is the only line in the poem that leaves the speaker’s own idiom entirely.

   What the speaker says against Empson is nothing, and that is the move. The dog is his proof that a life cannot be topped up, and quoting the proof concedes the case. The disagreement is postponed by one line.

   The B line then imports a different poet. “So senseless, silly” is a Plath-style flippancy set against laboratory gravity, and “instead” pivots: instead of the transfusion, instead of the arithmetic. The verb supplied is love, the thing “Missing Dates” does not contain, and “love fully” picks up “love full to the end” from stanza three. The month is not disputed. How to spend it is.

   The refrain supplies the second person Empson never had. After an animal bled dry on a bench, a human address is the argument in miniature. The dog got a month; the speaker takes the month and says something to somebody.

   Stanza 6 — The Waking, Theodore Roethke

   Feel your fate and of those so close by
   Unthinking, unplanned, unlearned, born and led
   To live like children until we die
   I’ll love you until then, ok, byebye

   Roethke stops fighting. He wakes to sleep and takes his waking slow, learns by going, and feels his fate in what he cannot fear.

   The A line does what stanza five did, welding two moments of its source into one sentence. “Feel your fate” comes from “I feel my fate in what I cannot fear,” and “of those so close by” compresses “Of those so close beside me, which are you?” Both of Roethke’s registers arrive with them: the sensory verb — feel, not think or know — and the turn toward the people standing nearby.

   What the speaker does is convert on three fronts. First person becomes second, so a report becomes an instruction. The fate becomes plural, extending past the speaker to everyone close at hand. And Roethke’s question becomes a statement: he asks which of those beside him the addressee is, genuinely unsure, while the speaker has no such doubt about who is being spoken to. His acceptance is solitary and philosophical, a man alone with his own ending. This asks the harder version, since being unafraid of one’s own death is one thing and feeling the mortality of the people in the room without flinching is another.

   The B line alliterates on a prefix rather than a consonant, three negations stacked into an anaphora, with “unlearned” inverting learning by going and “born and led” closing on being carried rather than driving. Those three un- words – “Unthinking, unplanned, unlearned” – are a definition of a child, so the line reaches the refrain’s vocabulary a beat before the refrain does.

   Both refrains then close together. “To live like children until we die” has just been literalised by the line above it, and the last line narrows a stanza that had opened outward to those close by back down to one speaker and one person.

   5. Conclusion and Commentary

   What the speaker conveys is that dying is settled and fear of it is not. It happens, poof, and no amount of gravity postpones it by an afternoon. The poem visits five poets not to decide whether to die but to work out how to spend the interval, and it declines each of their postures in turn: not Plath’s isolation, not Thomas’s rage, not Auden’s silence, not Empson’s clinical despair. Only Roethke is kept, and even he is converted from report into instruction and widened from one man to a room. After all that technical labour the conclusion is almost embarrassingly plain — play, want out loud, don’t flinch — and the plainness is earned rather than naive, because every sophisticated alternative has been tried on and returned.

   It is a love poem, and not incidentally. The formal evidence is in which refrain gets the last word, addressed to a second person present throughout, and in the fact that every borrowed poet is pulled toward that address. Plath’s solitary hallucination becomes “kiss me,” which needs someone to obey it. Thomas’s fury at a dying father is answered by a lover’s promise. Auden’s unspeakable feeling is named as love. Empson, who wrote a death poem with nobody in it, has a beloved inserted into the very line that concedes his argument. Five poems about mortality are systematically converted into one poem about a person, and that conversion is the argument. Death is the occasion; love is the subject.

   On death, the view is that the avoidable part is the dread. Rage, arithmetic and the unanswered question all make the time before death worse without making death later. On love, the claim is stranger and better: love here defends nothing, delays nothing, and has no reason behind it. It is offered anyway, as the content of the interval rather than a shield against its ending, which is why the promise is always bounded. “Until then,” never forever. A love claiming no limit would be lying about the ending, and the poem does not lie about the ending anywhere.

   As for whether the premise works: the risk in an allusive villanelle is that it becomes a puzzle box, erudition standing where feeling should be. This one escapes for two reasons. The refrains are unliterary — “ok, byebye” is the counterweight to the whole apparatus and does emotional work quotation cannot — and no poet or title is named anywhere, so the references have to earn their place as English rather than as citations. The constraints are also better chosen than they first look. Alliteration is a child’s pleasure, nursery-rhyme sound play, so requiring it in every B line reinforces the thesis instead of decorating it, and the same holds for the anaphora closing stanza six. The rhyme families were picked shrewdly too: the -y and -ed sounds are generous enough in English to absorb seven and six landings without visible forcing.

   The strongest line is “Slowly the poison bled an old dog dry,” which fuses two Empson quotations into one image and gets a laboratory onto the page in a love poem without breaking anything. Its risk is real — for one line the speaker’s voice disappears entirely into somebody else’s — but it lands, because that is the stanza where the speaker has decided to concede rather than argue, and a borrowed voice is the right vehicle for a concession.

   The two most compressed lines in the poem are both fusions of this kind, the Empson and the Roethke, and that doubling is the technical signature of the whole thing: two separate lines from one source welded into a single sentence that reads as though it had always been one. It also carries the poem’s one real cost. “Of those so close by” is grammatical because “Of those so close beside me” stands behind it, and read cold, without the source, it goes slightly sideways. The same holds structurally. A reader who does not know the five villanelles still gets a working poem, because the A lines are all sentences, but loses the argument entirely, since the argument exists only in the conversions. That is the price of the premise, and the poem pays it knowingly.

   Until then: ok, byebye

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