Ballade
Quick answer: The ballade is a French form of three eight-line stanzas and an envoi, all ending on one refrain. Learn its rules, from Villon to light verse, and try it.
A ballade is a French fixed form of twenty-eight lines: three eight-line stanzas rhyming ababbcbC and a four-line envoi rhyming bcbC, where the capital C marks a refrain that ends every stanza. The entire poem runs on just three rhyme sounds, and strict tradition forbids repeating any rhyme word. It is not the same thing as a ballad, despite the near-identical name.
The ballade was the dominant French lyric form of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the shape in which court poets competed at festivals where the envoi's traditional opening address, Prince, saluted the presiding judge. Poets still write it for the same reason athletes run the four hundred metres: it is a known distance with known hurdles, and grace under those conditions is visible to everyone watching.
How It Works
The refrain is the whole game. It ends all four units, so it must bear four arrivals, each from a different direction, and the stanzas' job is to keep finding new roads to the same door. Three rhyme sounds across twenty-eight lines means the b sound alone needs fourteen words, a serious inventory in English.
Suppose your refrain were the invented line 'and still the rent falls due on Monday morning'. One stanza could reach it through romance, one through illness, one through good luck, with the envoi turning to the landlord, prince of nothing much. The comedy or grief lives in the approaches.
Where You Will See It
François Villon owns the form. His ballade asking where the famous women of history have gone, with its refrain about the snows of yesteryear, is one of the most echoed poems in European literature, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation carried it into English. Chaucer wrote ballades in French fashion, and the Victorian revival led by Swinburne, Andrew Lang and Austin Dobson turned the form into a playground, after which Chesterton, Belloc and Dorothy Parker made it the natural home of polished light verse. That double life, lament and joke, continues.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose the refrain first and stress-test it aloud: it must close an argument four times without going stale, so favour lines that can read as both statement and punchline. Then audit your rhyme sounds for stock before drafting, especially the b sound. Modern practice tolerates slant rhyme and relaxed metre, but keep the refrain exact. The ballade also thrives on named, specific detail in its catalogues, and that concreteness is precisely what contest readers reward when they score language; a witty ballade has placed more than once in Writory's monthly results.
What poets can take from this
- Pick a refrain that survives four returns; test it in four different tones before committing.
- List fourteen candidate b-rhyme words before you write a line.
- Give each stanza its own territory so the poem is three journeys to one destination.
- Address the envoi to someone, Prince or otherwise; the turn to a listener is part of the form's drama.
- Read Villon in translation and one Parker ballade to hear the form's two temperaments.
Try it yourself
Write a ballade cataloguing things you have lost, one category per stanza, with a refrain that states what you still have. Address the envoi to your younger self.
Questions
What is the difference between a ballade and a ballad?
The ballade is a French fixed lyric form: three ababbcbC stanzas plus a bcbC envoi, all on one refrain. The ballad is a narrative folk form in loose quatrains. The names share a root but the forms share almost nothing.
What is the envoi in a ballade?
The closing four-line stanza, rhyming bcbC and ending on the refrain. It traditionally opens by addressing a prince, a legacy of medieval poetry competitions judged by a presiding noble.
Can a ballade repeat rhyme words?
Strict tradition says no word may be used twice as a rhyme, which is part of the challenge. Modern poets sometimes relax this, but the refrain must repeat exactly.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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