Why “ballade” is a great word
BALLADE — [Noun] A poem of one or more triplets of stanzas, each ending with a repeated refrain, and often a concluding envoi, or a musical composition of a lyrical and narrative character. From French ballade, from Old Provençal ballada ("poem for a dance"), from balar ("to dance"), from Late Latin ballare ("to dance"). First attested in English in the late 15th century. Unlike a ballad, which suggests a simpler, anonymous folk narrative, or an ode, an exalted and formally variable address, the ballade is a strict architecture of recurrence, a cage of rhyme built for a circling thought. It is the chiseled triplets of Villon, the haunting refrain of a Chopin piano piece, and the ghost of a dance in a gilded hall—a form that finds its freedom not in abandon, but in the solemn, recurring pulse of its own constraints, where the only escape from the pattern is through its perfect completion.