BALLAD
This is a folk form, very popular in England in the century just before the English Renaissance. It has endured, however, to our own day. "Frankie and Johnny" has been a popular ballad in American century culture, and rock stars today have contributed many ballads to our heritage: "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" and "The Ballad of Billy Joe" are but two.
The ballad stanza is four lines long, generally rhyming A B C B, and the meter is iambic tetrameter for lines 1 and 3, iambic trimeter for lines 2 and 4. The following stanza opens the ancient ballad "The Wife of Usher's Well":
There lived a wife at Usher's Well,
And a wealthy wife was she;
She had three stout and stalwart sons,
And sent them o'er the sea.
Can you scan the lines? Try writing a stanza in ballad meter yourself.