EXERCISES PAG.98-99

Exercise 1

1. hunting

2. forest

3. mother

4. meet

5. true-love

6. eels

7. poisoned

8. heart

9. gold and silver

10. hell and fire

Exercise 2

a. The story is told in general terms because both of the characters reveal only a part of what they know and they don't describe deeply their feelings and the details of what happened in the forest.

b. “I'm wearied” and “fain wad lie doon”.

c. The climax of the story is in the sixth stanza where the mother discovers that his son has been poisoned. In this way, the situation is upset: the Lord is dying.

d. - Lord Randal meeting in the woods? Stanzas 1 - 6

    - Lord Randal's oral testament? Stanzas 7 - 11

Exercise 3

a. The words that point out his position in medieval society are: “Lord”, “hawks and hounds”, “four and twenty milk kyes”, “ gold and silver”, “my houses and my lands”.

b. A testament is important in this context because it tells what the relatives are going to receive when the Lord will die.

Exercise 4

The dialogue mother-son is factual because only the mother expresses her emotions: she is worried about is son and she is taking care of him, she asks him where he has been and she's trying to help him. Lord Randal, instead, isn't communicating any of his feelings in his dialogue, he looks as a man without emotions that is giving orders to his mother, without affection.

Exercise 5

From the poem it seems that Lord Randal's true-love is a witch, because she has poisoned him and she lives in the greenwood, a place considered during the Middle Ages the house of supernatural creatures.

Exercise 6

The symbol of her false love are the eels she cooked for him and that were poisoned.

The eels are slimy animals, that escape easily from the hands as the girl runs away from the Lord's hands.

Exercise 7

1. Lord Randal has been poisoned by a girl who lives in the greenwood and for this reasons she looks like a witch, a supernatural creature

2. The themes of the poem are love and the mother-son relationship.

3. The poem begins when the Lord has already been in the wood and finishes without telling if the man dies and what happens to his true-love.

4. The story is told in general terms, without exploring details and deleting some aspects of the conversation.

5. The all poem is built on the conversation between mother and son.

6. There are eleven stanzas with four lines each and each two of them are couplets.

7. Each stanza follows the same scheme of the others and repeats the mother's question two times.

8. All the poem is a refrain because the construction of the first stanza is repeated for all the other ones, with almost the same words       and only a few changes.

9. In the poem there are some conventional symbols as the role of the woman in the society and the power of the man.