My literary analysis of the poem “Oh where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son”.

“Oh where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son” was written by an anonymous author.

Taking the title into account, I expect the poem to be about an aristocratic man because of the noun “Lord” used, which was a common name back in the day to refer to aristocratic figures, and a place from where he has just come back from. Also, I expect the poem to concern motherhood or fatherhood being the expression “my son” written at the end of the title.

The poem is arranged into 10 quatrains (stanzas of 4 lines each) and it presents alternations of dialogues and narration. A lot of expressions get repeated and a lot of questions get asked and then answered. Also, there is a rhyming couplet.

Lord Randal comes back from the forest and he isn’t feeling very good. As soon as his mother sees him, she starts asking him one question after another, curious and worried, caring about the young man’s health. During the reading, the reader will understand the relationship between mother and son, which is close from mom to son but not the other way around, being Lord Randal a very self-centred man, who doesn’t really want to answer his mother’s questions and, on the contrary, basically shuts her up ordering her to make his bed so that he could rest. Going on with the reading, the reader finds out that the Lord is actually feeling sick because of what he ate in the forest, a dish gifted from a misterious creature he has previously met while hunting.   When about to die, he is asked to say what he is going to give away to his siblings and his “true-love”.

The first stanza, just like every other (except for the 8th one), starts with Lord Randal’s mother questions and provides her emotions. While answering, the alliteration of the letter “m” in the expressions “mother, mak my bed soon” in almost every stanza makes us understand how the man relies on his mother, who would do anything for his “handsome young man” (line 2). With the answers given by the man, we can understand his quick and assorting personality, opposite to his mother’s.

So, the first stanza introduces you the 2 characters of the story and their personality traits.

The second stanza satisfies the Lord’s mother curiosity, where the Lord keeps on answering his mother’s questions in a distinterested way: this reinforces the distance between the two figures and the Lord’s rudeness.

The topic of bad attitude in the poem gets reinforced when the Lord talks about his true-love: first of all, the fact that he defines this person his “true-love” (line 7) tells us that his previous relationships have never been good enough for him. Second of all, this person gifts the man “eels fried in a pan” (line 11): “eels” are squishy animals, who might remind the reader either the snake (which has its own figure) or the male sexual organ (which has another meaning).

The food turns out to be poisoned: this explaines a lot about how people used to use strategy in the Middle Ages, and how people still use it today to get what they desire.