I wrote something related to this back in the 70s. It attempted the villanelle form but I missed many of the finer points, so it sort of worked but was not a villanelle after all. I was also not in a good place mentally - when my wife read it decades later, she commented with her doctor's hat on: "You do know that that is suicidal ideation, don't you?", and I did. The original had a bit of influence from The Lady of Shallot, and La Belle Dame Sans Merci but was overwrought: the youth definitely suicided, and the maid was not in the scene and only alluded to obscurely. The line length was also considerably longer and not regular: 15- 17 syllables each.

So approaching the topic again, I kept part of the original verse, but trimmed it considerably. The meter is deliberately truncated: trochaic pentameter but with the final soft syllable removed (or four trochees and a stressed monosyllable). More importantly, the focus is now far more ambiguous - why is the youth dead? Make your own mind up.

The original title was Death By Water. But having rewritten it almost totally, I decided that an in joke was required, for the original is now "dead in the water"