Ballade

The ballade - do not confuse ballade (pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, ba-LAHD, IPA: /bæ 'lɑːd/) and ballad (pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, BAL-erd, IPA: /'bæ ləd/) - is a poem or song consisting of three stanzas followed by an envoi (i.e., a short dedicatory or explanatory stanza). The three stanzas usually have seven, eight, or ten lines each and the envoi usually has four or five lines. (Stanzas of seven lines are particularly common in early English ballades, while stanzas of ten lines are much more common in French than in English ballades.)

Both the three stanzas and the envoi follow a strict rhyme scheme, the same set of rhymes being used throughout the poem; and the final line of each stanza and of the envoi is the same, i.e., it is a refrain. In the example which follows the rhyme scheme is: ababbccdcD, ababbccdcD, ababbccdcD, ccdcD (where D is the refrain). However, other rhyme schemes not too dissimilar from this are also possible - for example, ababbcC, or ababbcbC, or ababbccB. Ballades have been written in a variety of metres, but English ballades most commonly use iambic pentameters (as in the example which follows) or iambic tetrameters.

As you will realise, the ballade requires the poet to find many different rhyming words - in the example which follows twelve are needed for the 'c' rhyme - and perhaps for this reason it has not been a popular verse form with English poets, though ballades have been written by, e.g., Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). It is easier to find many different rhyming words in French, and the ballade was particularly attractive to French poets of the middle ages, for example, François Villon (!431-?), many of whose poems are ballades.

The example which follows is The Epitaph in Form of a Ballade by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The poem is in fact a translation of L'Epitaphe, a ballade composed by François Villon in 1463 when he had been convicted of a criminal offence and expected to be hanged along with his fellow-criminals. (In the event Villon was reprieved but banished from Paris, and nothing is known of him after this date.)

Men, brother men, that after us yet live,

Let not your hearts too hard against us be;

For if some pity of us poor men ye give,

The sooner God shall take of you pity.

Here are we five or six strung up, you see,

And here the flesh that all too well we fed

Bit by bit eaten and rotten, rent and shred,

And we the bones grow dust and ash withal;

Let no man laugh at us discomforted,

But pray to God that he forgive us all.

If we call on you, brothers, to forgive,

Ye should not hold our prayer in scorn, though we

Were slain by law; ye know that all alive

Have not wit alway to walk righteously;

Make therefore intercession heartily

With him that of a virgin's womb was bred,

That his grace be not as a dry well-head

For us, nor let hell's thunder on us fall:

We are dead, let no man harry or vex us dead,

But pray to God that he forgive us all.

The rain has washed and laundered us all five,

And the sun dried and blackened; yea perdie,

Ravens and pies with beaks that rend and rive

Have dug our eyes out, and plucked off for fee

Our beards and eyebrows; never are we free,

Not once, to rest; but here and there still sped,

Drive at its wild will by the wind's change led,

More pecked of birds than fruits on garden-wall;

Men, for God's love, let no gibe here be said,

But pray to God that he forgive us all.

Prince Jesus, that of all art Lord and head,

Keep us, that hell be not our bitter bed;

We have nought to do in such a master's hall.

Be not ye therefore of our fellow-head,

But pray to God that he forgive us all.