The ballad ''Lord Randal'' is made up of ten quatrain ( typical structure of medieval ballad) and it is mainly the recording of a dialogue.
Right from the title the intelligent reader can understand that the protagonist of the ballad is an aristocratic young man. The stanzas are similar: there is a repetition of the last line in the first five stanzas and also the last line of the others stanza are the same; the repetition helps to remember the ballad. The first stanza introduces the situation : Lord Randal's mother asks her son where he has been because he looks tired and he feels like fainting and the son answers that he has been at the wood ( typical setting of the ballad) and so the first two line of each stanza refers to the mother's question and the other two lines to the Lord Randal's answer.
The mother addresses Lord Randal as '' my handsome young man '' making understand that he is attractive, young and also displays the mother's sense of possessiveness underlines by the repetitive use of the possessive adjective ''my'' on the contrary Lord Randal doesn't want to underline that she is his mother, his answers are ''cold'', he wants to go away and not to answer to his mother's questions , he wants to stay alone. The sound ''m'' is repeated seven times in the first stanza and it is the typical sound of somebody who is complaining. In the other stanzas the mother continued to give him a lot of question because she is frightened of his absence, thanks to the other stanzas we can understand that Lord Randal has met in the ''greenwood'' his ''true-love'' : the love seems to be true but thanks to the last stanza the reader can understand that his ''true-love'' probably give him a poison to kill him and take his inheritance. So ''Lord Randal'' is a supernatural and a tragic love ballad.