Usually of love or adventure it is a long singing poem that tells a story, written in quatrains - four lines alternatively of four and three feet - the third line may have internal rhyme.
Examples of the form are found in Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Oscar Wilde's “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

It is French in origin and made up of 28 lines, usually three stanzas of 8 lines and a concluding stanza, called envoi, of 4 lines. The last line of each stanza is the same and the scheme is ababbcbc and the envoy's is bcbc.

This term originally was used to refer to the order of minstrel-poets who composed and recited the poems that celebrated the feats of Celtic chieftains and warriors. The term 'bard' has become synonymous with poet, particularly with a revered poet such as Shakespeare who is often referred to as 'the bard of Avon'

(Greek, 'depth')
Alexander Pope's "Peri-Bathous" or the "Art of Sinking in Poetry" (1728) describes bathos as a poet's fall, in a work of sober tones, into an unintentionally comic pathos.

Poetry that is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in blank verse.

A one-foot line in certain stanzaic forms of medieval alliterative poetry, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Brief narrative poems about Arthurian subjects. E.g., Chaucer's Franklin's Tale.

Poems printed on one side of a single sheet during the Renaissance period.

Six-line stanza with the rhyme scheme aaabab (where a is a tetrameter line, and b is a dimeter line).