Lady Diamond is the name of a ballad. The title "Lady Diamond" makes the reader understand that the ballad would talk about an important lady, a very precious lady belonging to aristocracy, thanks to the use of the name "lady".
The ballad talks about a tragic-love story between the king's daughter and a servant, a "kitchen boy". It consists of 13 four-line stanzas, called quatrain (stanzas made up of four line each) and the structure consists in dialogue, to express the protagonists' emotions and to make the story real, and narration, to create the context and the setting of the story. In fact, it is set in a castle in Scotland and the first stanza recalls the opening of a fable, that creates an exotic feeling. There is a third-person omniscient narrator and the language is popular, simple and concrete and there is the use of dialects.
The first stanza set the atmosphere and it introduces the main character (the king and his daughter) and the setting. We can find from the first room some figures of speech: the repetition of the same name "king", that step into the reader's mind. From the third line we can understand that the father really love her daughter: "dear" was an expression of affection. In the fourth line the narrator starts with "lady Diamond" and ends with "name" to make the rhyme with the second line "fame". We have an alternate rhyme in all the ballad.
The second stanza introduces the further protagonist, lady Diamond's love. He was a servant, a kitchen boy, a very disdain person. In the eighth line there is the use of the nature to mark the pass of the time because people, at that time, had not got clocks, so it was nature that marks the pass of the time. This stanza is dominated by love, that we find repetitively in line seven.
The third stanza is important in the economy of the story, because there is the imbalance of the story with lady Diamond's pregnancy. After "twenty weeks", about five months, her pregnancy was visible: the dresses started to be close and little. In a very concrete matter of fact language, we understand the dramatic situation of lady Diamond.
In the fourth stanza there is the reference to the winter season: the king went to his daughter room like a "wandering ghost": the dad was worried and he could not sleep in the night.
In the fifth stanza there is for the first time the introduction of the dialogue, where the king talked to her daughter. He was worried and he asked her what is wrong and why she looks so pale and the dresses did not close. The language used in the ballad is very realistic and it is full of figurative images that make the reader better understand and live the story. In this stanza there is the confirmation of lady Diamond's pregnancy.
The sixth stanza is only made up of dialogue: the girl confessed to the king her hidden love for the servant and she prayed him to forgive her "crime". Also the seventh stanzas is made up of dialogue: the king ordered to kill the boy. In the 28 line we understand that the king want to do it secretly, in secret. In fact, the eighth stanza narrate the servant's murder. The use of sounds mark the way the king wants to kill the servant, "There wasn't any sounds to be heard, not another word was said": they captured the man in silence. The use of this words create a realistic atmosphere that makes you live the story.
The ninth stanza recalls the cruelty of aristocracy to kill poor people, their indifference in front of death. They had killed the boy and put his heart in a golden bowl to give it to lady Diamond. This is a terrible revenge for lady Diamond's "crime" to have loved a servant.
The tenth stanza there is the use of repetition, assonance to create the rhythm, it seems to be a poem spoken by lady Diamond to her love. She cried so much and she was desperate so that she died in pain. The king, once he knew this, went crazy and he wondered how her daughter could have died for the love of a servant. The last stanza marks the nostalgic of the king and the love for her died daughter.