Bonnie George Campbell

Bonnie George Campbell is a ballad. Right from the title the reader
understands the text may be about and handsome attractive man as
suggested by the adjective "bonnie".
The structure is the typical four line-stanza as it always happened in
ballad that are the expression of popular taste and culture. It mixes
dialogue and narration and therefore it is the reader's task to find
out the different functions of dialogue and narration. Going through
the text you can immediately understand that while the narrator
creates the setting where the characters' life and adventures take
place, dialogue play a more dramatic role: it is a structural mean
and way/mode to convey to the reader the emotional aspect of the
story.

The first stanza sets the atmosphere of the hole ballad resorting to
repetition of sounds and semantic choices. The preposition "upon"
immediately makes the reader understand the situation takes place in
a hill area: "high upon the Highlands". Therefore the action is
set in Scotland, near the Tay.

Geographical references add concreteness and reality to the story told by the
narrator, who immediately introduces the protagonist, Bonnie George
Campbell and lets the reader understand that he can ride and that he
went out one day on horse.

The second stanza recreates on the level of rhythm the action of riding.
The narrator uses an anaphoric syntax in the first line. He uses
subject and verb, subject and verb again and decides to reinforce the
idea of riding with the alliterative use of sound (saddle,bridle).
The sound "d" repeated three times recreates the typical jumping
effect of they who go on horse. The second line of the second stanza
shows George's attitude first (gallant) and, in addition, uses
inversion as the reader can see in construction "rode he" where
the subject is placed at the end of the line: that is in keep
position in order to draw the reader's attention on the main
character who is the pivot of the hole ballad.

Besides the keep position of "he" at the line six creates the rhyme with
line eight so that again "he" remains at the centre of interest.
The most important word choice in line eight is indeed the time
reference "never" and therefore it is in keep position because
all the remaining part of ballad will depend on George Campbell's
disappearance: "he never came home". Never is all absolute
reality; it allows no change what or ever in his destiny and in all
of his family destiny.

The narrator is mostly interested in expressing Bonnie's mother and
Bonnie's bridge reaction. Again the narrator uses inversion of word
order to put to the forefront the role of the two women that are also
the most important women of his life. Again the use of repetition in
syntactical forms (out came his mother and out came....) besides
recreating a phonological parallelism recalls line seven in the
previous stanza. Here Bonnie's horse is quoted with the same
syntactical choice as a way to express all of Bonnie's world made up
by family and horse.

Desperation is the way his wife "rives" her hair: she tears her hair and the
reaction is extremely important. It does not only express her deep
pain, it also make the intelligent reader understand that since
Bonnie's death all her social status is compromised since in the
Middle Ages women had no autonomous status and they totally depend on
their husband.

The real message of the ballad is indeed conveyed by dialogue where it is
the speaking voice to underline the terrible destiny of Bonnie George
Campbell. The stanza recalls almost in an echo-effect the sorrow left
behind by someone's death. Nature (meadow,corn) has here the role of
symbolically representing human feeling thus becoming the
metaphorical representation of human suffering.

The following stanzas completely recall to the memory and to the reader's
memory the tragic event of Bonnie's adventure that turned out into a
tragedy. The choice of a

"plume in his helmet"

"a sword at his knee"

seem to create a visual picture of a young man on a horse.

The tragedy is hintedet by the adjective "bloody" immediately
followed by the verb "to be", a perception verb that is one that
does not depend on people's winnings. 
The ballad symbolically ends with the most significant words, the ones on
which repetition and incremental repetition was based.