Ballads, like poems, mark their origin in oral tradition. A traditional ballad is an anonymous oral form which is a combination of poetry, song and dance. Ballads were born in some country between England and Scotland, in the 15th and 16th centuries. At the beginning ballads were anonymous.
As a poetic form, it is both a narrative and a dramatic text, with graphic details, concentrating on a single episode, like the poem.
Ballads have got a narrator or some of them concentrate on dialogues that tell the story or you can find both narration and dialogue.
But in the poem there no dialogues summerizing or explaining the story.
The traditional form of ballads is based on a structure of four-line stanzas which usually rhyme:”abcd”; but there are other rhyme sequence like “aabb” or “abab”.
The language used in the ballads is simple and makes a repetitive word choice. It shows a clear high frequency of words of Anglo-Saxon origin, like the use of the expression “true-love”. Also the poem was written in Anglo-Saxon or Old English.As it happens in poems, in ballads alliterations are often used; they help memorize the story and tha text together with music.