Yes, it's a ballade -- with an "e". The reference to birds is a signature trope from the troubadors, one of whom I believe may have invented the form. It is best known for the French literary poet Francois Villon, whom I posted on very early in this blog. The standard translation of his masterwork, The Testament, is by American master Galway Kinnell, also referenced in that blog post (The Forensic Caesura, in the 2008 archive).
Kinnell, in his introduction, says something about rhyme being a "dead hand" for a modern poet, and writing ballades made me see where he was coming from. That B rhyme has got to match a lot of English words! And this is the shorter form of ballade used by Villon.
I had to struggle with this one because all my beforehand planning meant nothing once I started to write! I think English really rewards the laconic writer (Perhaps French the prolix*? I wouldn't know.), but with the ballade, you have the English quatrain doubled, with a mandatory refrain line at the end. So, you've got to use "beefier" ideas to fill the ballade out, but you have the requirements of much tougher rhyme scheme and overall form to meet than say, the sonnet. Remember, English, like German, has fewer rhyme words than any Romance language. For example, the Italian ballata and ballatteta, similar to the French ballade, have much tougher rhyme schemes than the French form does. I doubt the Italian form (or forms -- not sure if ballata and ballatetta are that different) can even be attempted in English for original poetry.
This blog is mostly about form, but the matter of my ballade deserves some comment from me, too. Though I think it's hard (if not impossible) to critique your own work usefully, here goes:
I was tempted to put "Easter" in quotation marks in the title, because I'm not referring strictly to the Christian festival day so much as the general idea of springtime resurrection. And though the envoi (that's the last four lines, my friends) pointedly refers to a natural disunity, the unity of nature is the dominant theme of the work (I say "work" because, if you remember, someone else has got to call it a poem before it gets to be one, at least in my book.). Irony is tough to bring forth, especially these days, in formal verse, partly because I think you need swings in diction ("'Twixt" and "on the make", for instance) to really pull it off -- but the form is so daunting that it can stifle that sort of thing, or make it come off as really pompous (a perennial problem for me). I revised "twixt" out several times, only to put it back in, simply because I needed the "x" to suggest the real theme here. (I'm serious.) Still, I thought the exercise was worth it, partly because, as the third of a series of ballades (the other two are too personal to put here), it needs contextual references to Villon for the whole to work, at least for me.
So yes, maybe it's OK for English writers to use French verse forms, after all. But I still think you need a really good reason to do it.You'll have to decide for yourself whether or not I had one.
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* I meant 'prolix' in the original sense of 'extended', not necessarily with the negative connotations we have in the word's modern sense.
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