Geordie

Just considering the title I expect the poem to be about a man who is named Geordie.

The layout made me understand the text is a poem and shows the composition consist in 25 lines arranged in 10 stanzas of 4 lines each separated by full stops and spaces between them.

The speaker tells about the time he or she was walking on the London Bridge when he heard a pretty maid is lamenting for the man she loved. The maid started saying her Geordie would be hanged in a golden chain because he was born from King's royal breed. Afterwards she started praying for help in favor of the man. In the next stanza she's talking to the judge and she's begging him to let her Geordie go. The judge responds by telling her he cannot pardon Geordie. In the last stanza you understand that the young lady couldn't do anything for Geordie who will be hanged in a golden chain.

You can find many repetitive expressions that belong to the semantic field (“life” “born”). Important are maid's feelings underlined by the use of verb tenses that shows them: the first two lines of the third quatrain start both with the repetition of “Go” that is an Imperative with you can understand she is praying for the life of her man but also giving orders to him; the Infinitive is used in the last two lines to express her will and her goal which is trying to convince the judge to let Geordie live; the Present Conditional in the last two lines of the following stanza that she uses to makes the reader understand that she would do anything in exchange of Geordie's life; the Simple Present is used by the judge who speaks because the situation won't change. In the end from the last stanza you can understand the situation did not change because Geordie will be hanged in a golden chain