Ballade

Ballade, a term applied to a poem consisting of one or more terns or triplets of seven- or eight-lined stanzas, each ending with the same line as refrain, and usually an envoy, as Chaucer's Complaynt of Venus and To his Purse. The foregoing is the strict application of the term—it is now frequently used somewhat more loosely of any poem divided into stanzas of equal length. This form, which was a favourite of Villon and many of the older French poets, has been revived by De Banville, Swinburne, Andrew Lang, Austin Dobson, and other recent poets.