Right from the title I expect the ballad is about a lord. The protagonist name's Randal and he is an aristocratic person. The ballad is from Scotland so the reader can find some Scottish words.

The ballad consists on ten stanza with four lines each and every stanza consists in two rhyming caplets (AABB).

It consists on a dialogue between the lord and his mother and  the two characters, as lots of ballads, are just sketched.

This poem is about a lord who has been in a greenwood. There, he has found his lover but she has betrayed and poisoned him. From the plot the reader understands the ballad is about he supernatural because the protagonist is poisoned but it is also about a tragic love story. In fact the lord is killed by his true love.

The phrases "Lord Randal my son", "my handsome young man" and "make my bed soon, for I'm wearied wi' hunting, and fain wad lie doon" are repeated in every stanza. They create the dance like pattern; in fact the first ballads were handed out orally, accompanied by music and they were danced.

In the second stanza the reader finds the word "true-love". The narrator used the expression "true" because it is ironic.

From the sixth stanza the phrase "for I'm wearied wi' hunting, and fain wad lie doon" is changed into "for I'm sick at the heart and fain wad lie doon" because the lord's mother discovers that his son was poisoned. The protagonist says that he is sick because he is ill but also because he was betrayed.