Lord Randal is the name of the ballad. Right from the title the reader's expectation is to read something about a men, Lord Randal, belonging to aristocracy (as the intelligent reader can see the name "Lord"). Just from the title we can imagine the story takes place in a aristocratic family and the protagonist of this story would be Lord Randal.
The poem is organized into four-line stanzas, called quatrain, rhyming ABAA. The text is made up of dialogue, there is not the presence of narration and the question-syntax reinforces memory and makes the ballad more interesting and repetitive. The language is simple and concrete, with the use of dialect, such as all ballads.
Reading the whole text the reader can immediately see the simple style and the repetition and incremental repetition of different lines and structure: in every quatrain there is the question of the mother than the Lord Randal's answer. There is also the repetition of "Oh, where have you been, Lord Randal, my son? ..., my handsome young man?", ".. mother, mak my bed soon, for I'm wearied wi' hunting, and fain wad lie doon"
The first stanza set the atmosphere and the places where the story takes place: in the greenwood, the typical one of Medieval taste. It also introduce the situation: Lord Randal has just returned home from hunting in the woods. He looks so tired and upset, so the mother asks him where he has been. The answer will be always the same, but in every stanza will change the first piece. In this case, he answers he has been to the greenwood.
In every stanza we can feel a sense of suffering, an atmosphere of death produced by the use of grave words sound and the punctuation. Just from the start the intelligent reader can understand the relationship between mother and son in the Middle Ages. The mother describe Lord Randal as an "handsome young man", making the affection and the love of the mother to her child. Besides, the repetition of "my" makes clear the sense of the mother's possessiveness. There is also the alliteration of "m", present four times in the first two lines.
The second stanza is the same from the phonological level of the first one: Lord Randal answers to his mother's curiosity. In the wood he met his "true love", who coincides with a witch. Here the intelligent reader can see the presence of the supper nature, a typical topic of Medieval ballads, and people's ignorance to believe in ghosts, witches and other magic power. So, the protagonist has probably been under a negative spell. The words "true love" makes the intelligent reader understand the illusion of Lord Randal to have seen a beautiful woman who did him a spell.
The third stanza tells this. With the metaphor "Eals fired in a pan", the reader understands that the beautiful woman gave him a dangerous spell.
In every stanza there is the use of the imperative forms "mak my bed soon" told by Lord Randal. This makes the reader understand the situation in the Middle Ages of aristocracy's power and also of men's superiority. Man, specially if he is the first child, detained power, property and money in a family, so as the result women's life depended on the relationship they had with the main people.
In the fourth and fifth stanzas we can start understanding what Lord Randal's "true-love" has made to him and to his animals. They are died. We do not know yet how, but we can imagine because of the spell. In fact the sixth stanza describe how they are died and also explain that also Lord Randal is poisoned.
These are the saddest and the more emotional stanzas of the ballad. Here the reader can fell how the mother is feeling and what are her emotions. The concrete language helps the reader live the situation and also understand the mother's concern. In fact, in the Middle Ages, when the first child died, all the heritage of the family has to be divided. Probably, Lord Randal would make his will to decide who to leave each thing.
In the seventh stanza the intelligent reader can see the mother's concern: she would know what he would leave to her.
In the last four stanzas there is the incremental repetition of the same part of the line and there is the same structure used by the mother to know what Lord Randal would leave to each member of the family: "What d'ye leave to you mother/sister/brother/true-love". Lord Randal left to his mother "Four and twenty milk cow", to his sister "My gold and my silver", to his brother "my houses and my land" and to his true-love "her hell and fire".
In the last stanza the reader can see the presence of his "true-love". The words "hell" and "fire" makes understand Lord Randal's anger and contempt: he leaves to his "true-love" only the hell and the fire, the worst thing that a man could image.
In the Middle Ages, the only people's purpose was to reach salvation and go to heaven.
Lord Randal is an interesting text that communicates the way of life in the Middle Ages.