Edmund Gosse

“ The New Virelay is entirely written on two rhymes, and begins with two lines which are destined to form recurrent refrains throughout the whole course of the poem, and, reversed in order, to close it with a couplet. The virelay is a vaguer and less vertebrate form of verse than the sonnet, the ballad or the villanelle, and is of less importance than these in the history of prosody. ”