Lord Randal

Lord Randal is a ballad. Right from the title the reader can understand
that the ballad may be about the life or the adventures of Lord
Randal.

The structure is the typical four line-stanza as it always happened in
ballad and it is composed by ten stanzas. The rhyme scheme is ABAC.
There are a lot of repetitions of some sentences, not a typical
rhyme. This can help the intelligent reader to make the ballad record
in his mind.  There are only dialogues between the protagonist and
his mother. All the dialogues refer the emotions during their speech.
The mother is worried for her son. She gives him a lot of questions.
In all stanzas the end part of the first lines and last two lines are
repeated. The repetition of the possessive adjective "my" tells
us that the mother is very protective towards her son. She wants to
know where he was and she repeated her questions twice to underline
her fright during his absence. She treats her son like a child: she
does not notice that he is grown. She does not want to leave him. His
answers are "cold". He tells his mother only the essential, but
in every stanza he repeats that he wants a made bed to sleep because
he is tired. His underlines his closed character: he wants to go away
and not to answer his mother's questions. He tells that he wants to
sleep, but this is only an excuse: he wants to stay alone. There is
another detail. The mother calls Lord Randal "my son": she wants
to underline that he belongs to her, but the son calls the mother
"mother", without any adjective. He adds the adjective "my"
for the bed. This makes the reader understand that he does not want
to underline that she is HIS mother. In the third line there is the
repetition of the sound "oo" give us a sensation of the mother's
fright.
All the other stanzas have this structure, but this have different
questions and answers.

He tells that he will let to his parents material objects, but to his
true-love, who he met in the greenwood he wants to let hell and fire.
He want to leave his parents letting them some object that may make
him record, but he wants to give his true-love, who poisoned him, a
pain for his life after the death.