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" and "a sword at his knee" seems to create a visual picture of a young man on a horse.
The tragedy is hinted 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.