JoeF: I always regard 'false true-love' as a deliberate oxymoron: a most effectively concentrated formulation; so that it is saying in effect, in only 2/3 words, "I thought she was my true love but it turns out that alas she is nothing of the sort". True poetry! I agree with you re the effectiveness of the 'weary/sick' shift.

Dick: TtR a wonderful song indeed; but diffuse, whereas Randall is concentrated, all emphasis on the one dramatic incident of the man telling his mother what has happened. Which one finds the more poetic/dramatic is indeed a matter of taste. Someone [Scott? Child? Kitson?]* said perceptively that ballads tend to 'begin in the fifth act', making them intensely dramatic. Randall seems to me a particularly fine example of this phenomomenon.

(*PS have googled - it was Thos Gray, he of Elegy In Country Churchyard, who made this cogent observation.)