‘Cousin Kate’ has tied in the themes of betrayal, jealousy, class and love all together. ‘If you stood where I stand He’d not have won me with his love’. This shows that she felt betrayed by her cousin as she did not take her feelings into consideration when marrying the Lord. The jealousy is shown when she says, ‘The neighbours call you good and pure, Call me an outcast thing.’ This almost sounds as if she is saying it in a mocking tone, as people do when they are jealous. Also, the fact that they are referred to as ‘The Lord’ and ‘Lady Kate’, shows they are of a higher class than her.
The tone and mood changes throughout the poem. At the beginning, she expresses the happiness she felt while she was with the lord. ‘Fill my heart with care’. This shows she experienced happiness while she was with him. However, the tone soon changes to regret. ‘So now I moan an unclean thing, Who might have been a dove’. The ‘unclean’ shows she feels dirty for what she did and reflecting back on it she regrets it because she could have been a ‘dove’, i.e. pure.
The poet uses a lot of comparisons in the poem, for example, ‘Changed me like a glove’. This comparison is used to describe how she was treated using powerful imagery. She also uses comparisons to compare her to her cousin. ‘You grew more fair than I’. This shows she is comparing herself to her cousin to get across the reason that the Lord chose her cousin over her. The classic and basic structure of the poem ties in with the traditional ways of life at the time, being people’s attitude towards life and women in particular. The rhyming scheme is also basic with every alternate line rhyming in eight lined stanzas.
Like ‘Cousin Kate’, ‘The Seduction’ is about love and relationships, however, they are written in different times, so are sharing different attitudes towards them. ‘The Seduction’ is also about one relationship opposed to two in ‘Cousin Kate’.
‘The Seduction’ is quite recent and modern. It is about a teenage girl who goes to a party and meets a boy. He then takes her away to a river bank to sit with her alone where he giver her alcohol. This results in her getting extremely drunk, to the extent where she has no control over her actions and gets led into having sex. She is then left as a pregnant teenager alone.
This poem shares the themes of love and betrayal with ‘Cousin Kate’. The betrayal comes from the promise of love and romance from the teenage magazines. ‘And she ripped up all her My Guy and her Jackie photo-comics’. The teenage magazines had promised her a relationship full of romance and fun, whereas this relationship left her with a baby and her teenage years ruined.
The mood in the beginning of the poem is quite sinister and creepy. He takes her in the dark to an isolated and deserted river where they can’t be seen. ‘Far from the blind windows of the tower block’, shows that they are far from any people where even the sound of his ‘leather jacket creaking madly’ can be heard. This gives it a sinister feel.
The language used is quite modern. The poet uses strong imagery to describe the surroundings and the situation. ‘Green as a septic wound’. This strong image describes the lake to be quite disgusting and very unromantic. She also describes her head to be ‘rolling’ which clearly suggests the extent to which she is drunk. The structure of the poem is quite simple with four lines in a stanza, and with a simple rhyming pattern.
Overall, I prefer the ‘Cottage Maiden’ because it is more of a traditional story with less sinister and creepy situations, and the attitudes of that time were better and everything was more innocent. I also prefer the way in which it was written as opposed to the modern and occasionally slang language of ‘The Seduction’.