It turns out that the basic 'ballata' form is not that much different from some English poems and not all that hard to write. A definition in Wikipedia may refer to some text-for-music form -- the ballata poems I found in my old book of Italian poems (The Penguin Book of Italian Verse, edited and translated by George Kay) do not usually rhyme the way it says. They nearly all rhyme ABABBa -- or something similar. The little "a" in the rhyme scheme I'm using refers to a rhyme sound or word or line that recurs at the end of each stanza, not within the stanza itself. The 'ballatetta' is something I got from what Guido Cavalcanti called some of his ballata poems in that anthology -- his can be much more complex with very long stanzas and intricate rhyme schemes.* Wikipedia offers a link to the Italian text under the article titled with his name. Cavalcanti was a friend and colleague of Dante.
The form I used for my effort at a ballata I got from Angelo Poliziano, a friend and colleague of Lorenzo the Magnificent, also a master at the ballata. The Wikipedia article says that the 'ballata' is not like the French ballade, but like some other French form it names. However, the ballata poems by Poliziano and de Medici in my anthology look exactly like the French ballade of Villon -- though some of them use refraining rhyme sounds and words instead of refraining lines, and the verses do not rhyme with each other. Sometimes the Italian poems use refrain lines, though. The big difference is that they do not use an envoi at the end, but use a verset at the beginning. Dante's and Cavalcanti's ballata poems also use the beginning verset, at least in my anthology. It's probably not called a "verset". That's just my term for it. Each one of them introduces the refrain, whether a line, a word or a rhyme sound.
My effort -- "Spring's Flung" -- is based on one of Poliziano's (starting "Ben venga maggio" {'Welcome May' in the translation in my book}), at least in basic verse structure. I used a meter that I associate with dance -- trochaic tetrameter. It has a little beat at the end to stop the line, as I discussed in my post "Trochee Trips from Long to Short ...". The dance angle is something I got from the basic definition of "ballata" -- "a song for dance". The title of my effort is no conscious attempt at originality or ironic reference -- I just thought of it as I finished typing the text into the blog editor. I didn't have one before that. (Note: I've since slightly changed it and added a what I think is a made-up word to the verset {since changed}. I have also corrected two lines in the first full verse that each had one too many syllables [Egad!])
In the text itself, I appear to have either coined some words or bent them so far out of their ordinary usage that they might as well have been coined. "Sapping", for instance, refers to both growth and dehydration, in the sense of "drawing out" rather than draining, say, of strength (although you could think if it that way, if you want to). Also, "fond" refers to the older definition of "foolish," rather than liking something or someone. I took "capsuled heat" from a Borges short story -- though that exact term does not appear it the story, as far as I recall. And "antennae of their race" is an allusion to Ezra Pound.
I could say more, but I'd rather just let you have fun with what I've written. Again, you'll have to decide for yourself whether it's a poem or something 'bent'.
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*Poems that old don't usually have titles, other than their first lines. The Cavalcanti poem I have been thinking of is "Fresca rosa novella" (translated 'Fresh new rose', in my anthology) -- which is an exception, in several ways. It is the only one of his in my anthology not termed a "ballatetta" by Cavalcanti, and it does have a rhyme scheme that resembles what Wikipedia has been calling a "ballata". Maybe it's the author's effort at saying "This is the authentic ballata of the troubadors" or something like that -- but that's just my wild guess. The rhyme scheme is ABBABAABCDDEEa for each of three verses, and the beginning "verset" uses the rhyme scheme of last four lines of the main verse pattern. The little "a" is the refrain rhyme at the last part of each verse and the verset, fully a part of each one's final sentence but metrically a tag. Also, not only do the verses not rhyme with each other, but, once a rhyme sound is employed, it is ruled out for the rest of the poem, except for the refraining one that doesn't appear anywhere else. When I was thinking of "impossible to do successfully in English", this is the one I meant.
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