ballad stanza

noun

, Prosody.

1. a four-line stanza consisting of unrhymed first and third lines in iambic tetrameter and rhymed second and fourth lines in iambic trimeter, often used in ballads.

ballad stanza

noun

1. a four-line stanza, often used in ballads, in which the second and fourth lines rhyme and have three stresses each and the first and third lines are unrhymed and have four stresses each

Word History and Origins

Origin of ballad stanza¹

First recorded in 1930–35

Example Sentences

These specimens show the ballad stanza, which is made of a sort of septenary resolved into short lines of four and three accents.

From Project Gutenberg