Ballade (poetry)

Ballade (poetry), an Old French verse form generally of three eight-line stanzas with a concluding stanza of four lines called an envoi. With some variations, the lines of a ballade are iambic or anapaestic tetrameter rhyming ababbcbC; the envoi, which forms a personal dedication to some person of importance or to a personification, rhymes bcbC. The last line (C) of the first stanza is repeated as a refrain throughout. Another pattern often employed consists of a ten-line stanza, in pentameters, rhyming ababbccdcD, with an envoi of five lines rhyming ccdcD.

Originally written for music, the ballade has been traced to medieval Italian and Provençal sources. The form was first elaborated in the work of the 14th-century French poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut, and the best-known examples are those of French poets of the 14th and 15th centuries, especially François Villon and Charles d'Orléans. The ballade was used in England in the late 14th century by medieval poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote several notable examples, including the Complaint ... to His Empty Purse, though the form never became widely popular. From the 16th to the late 19th century the form disappeared from English poetry, but it was revived with mixed success by such poets as Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Musically, the ballade has the pattern AAB (A = text ab; B = text bcbC). The 12th- and 13th-century troubadours and trouvères composed monophonic ballades, that is, ballades consisting solely of unharmonized melody (the troubadours called the form canzo). These early texts prefigure the standardized verse form. Machaut established the ballade as a polyphonic (multipart) form. It became the favoured secular song form through to the end of the 14th century and persisted into the 15th. Indeed, the musical format typical of the ballade, which can be seen, for instance, in Machaut's Nes que on porroit, (uppermost part, often highly florid, for solo voice; the two lower parts usually played by instruments) influenced other forms and dominated European secular part-song into the 16th century.