ballade

ballade,
strictly a poem consisting of one or more triplets of seven- or (afterwards) eight-line stanzas, each ending with the same line as refrain, and usually an envoy addressed to a prince or his substitute; e.g. Chaucer 's Compleynt of Venus. It was a dominant form in 14th- and 15th-cent. French poetry, and one of its great masters was Villon . The form enjoyed a minor English revival in the late 19th cent. in the work of Swinburne , Henley , and Dobson .