LORD RANDALL

From reading the title, your expectations are to read about someone called Lord Randall, maybe he is belonging to aristocracy. The poem is made up of 10 quatrains that follow the typical structure of ballads in the Middle Ages.

The language used is easy and there are many words taken from the Scottish dialect. The first thing the reader can see is the constant use of refrains, that like every figure of speech has the aim to make easier the comprehension and the remembrance of the ballad. The whole ballad is a dialogue between Randall and his mother. He is an handsome man that goes hunting into the greenwood ( a place thought dangerous in the Middle Ages because it was haunted by fairies and elves) and came back with a "short rest" (= he is going to die soon).

In every stanza there are the same lines with only a little change of the words that make each stanza completely different from the others. It uses incremental repetition in the mother's phrases and her son's too.

In the first 5 quatrains the mother asks him what happened into the forest. Then in the 6^th stanza she realizes that he had been poisoned by the lover he met into the forest. This is one of the most relevant stanza as as the reader can notice from the absence in the layout of the "??". Then there is a lower climax because he tells the mother what things will leave to his relatives, and his behavior is nice, smart and generous (he gives lots of things)

But in the last quatrain the mother asks him what he is going to leave to his love that met in the greenwood. For the first time in the ballad he becomes angry and decide to gave his love only pain and sufferance.

This allows the reader to understand that he died for something that his love did. Maybe she poisoned him.