ballad stanza

ballad stanza, a verse stanza common in English ballads that consists of two lines in ballad metre, usually printed as a four-line stanza with a rhyme scheme of abcb, as in The Wife of Usher’s Well, which begins:

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.


They hadna been a week from her,
A week but barely ane,
Whan word came to the carlin wife,
That her three sons were gane.