§ 327. The ballade is a poetical form consisting of somewhat longer stanzas all having the same rhymes. Several varieties of it existed in Old French poetry. The two most usual forms are that with octosyllabic and that with decasyllabic lines. The first form is composed of three stanzas of eight lines on the model a b a b b c b C (cf. § [269]). The rhymes in each stanza agree with those of the corresponding lines in the two others, the last line, which is identical in all the three, forming the refrain; this refrain-verse recurs also at the end of the envoi, which corresponds in its structure to the second half of the main stanza, according to the formula b c b C. The decasyllabic form has three stanzas of ten verses on the scheme a b a b b c c d c D (cf. § [271]), and an envoi of five verses on the scheme c c d c D; the same rules holding good in all other respects as in the eight-lined form. It is further to be observed that the envoi began, as a rule, with one of the words Prince, Princesse, Reine, Roi, Sire, either because the poem was addressed to some personage of royal or princely rank, or because, originally, this address referred to the poet who had been crowned as ‘king’ in the last poetical contest.
In England also the ballade had become known as early as in the fourteenth century. We have a collection of ballades composed in the French language by Gower,[209] consisting of stanzas of either eight or seven (rhyme royal) decasyllabic verses with the same rhyme throughout the poem. Similar to the French are Chaucer’s English ballades in his Minor Poems, which, however, in so far differ from the regular form, that the envoi consists of five, six, or seven lines; in some of the poems even there is no envoi at all. Accurate reproductions of the Old French ballade are not found again until recent times. There are examples by Austin Dobson and especially by Swinburne (A Midsummer Holiday, London, 1884). They occur in both forms, constructed as well of four- and five-foot iambic, as of six-, seven-, or eight-foot trochaic or of five- and seven-foot iambic-anapaestic verses. (For specimens cf. Metrik, ii, § 588.)
§ 328. The Chant Royal is an extended ballade of five ten-lined ballade-stanzas (of the second form mentioned above), instead of three, together with an envoi. In Clément Marot we meet with another form of five eleven-line stanzas of decasyllabic verses also with the same rhymes throughout; the envoi having five lines. The scheme is a b a b c c d d e d E in the stanzas and d d e d E in the envoi.
A Chant Royal by Gosse, composed on this difficult model (perhaps the only specimen to be found in English poetry), is quoted Metrik, ii, § 589.
A more detailed discussion of these French poetical forms of a fixed character and of others not imitated in English poetry may be found in Kastner’s History of French Versification (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1903), chapter x. Cf. also Edmund Stengel, Romanische Verslehre, in Gröber’s Grundriss der Romanischen Philologie (Strassburg, 1893), vol. ii, pp. 87 ff.
OXFORD: HORACE HART M.A.
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NOTES
[1] Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, zweite Ausgabe, p. 624, Berlin, 1868.
[2] Metrik der Griechen, 1a, 500.
[3] It should be remarked that in Sanskrit, as in the classical languages, that prominence of one of the syllables of a word, which is denoted by the term ‘accent’, was originally marked by pitch or elevation of tone, and that in the Teutonic languages the word-accent is one of stress or emphasis.