Compaere and contast how love is represented

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Compare and Contrast how the different views of love are presented in “Cousin Kate” and “The Seduction”

Both poems are written by female poets, who express their love by exploring physical and emotional aspects. Both poets imply that men are motivated by the physical side of love while women treasure the emotional side. The female characters in each poem to begin with are naïve, innocent and vulnerable. However each being mistreated left them both experienced before their time. The Seduction is set in the mid 1970’s when a teenage girl is at a party and is lured by a sleazy boy. Cousin Kate is about a young maiden who is taken advantage of by a lord ho then leaves her for her cousin Kate. Both are left with an experience and a child.

        The poems were written in very different periods and reflect love and marriage in different social manors through time. ‘Cousin Kate’ was written in the Victorian reign around the 1870s. Love and marriage in the 1870s was very different to present time, as the Victorian citizen’s approach and mind-set was to expect women to provide children especially sons to become an heir, ‘Your father would give lands for one, To wear his coronet.’ This shows that the father would be willing to pay a lot of money (land) to have a grandson. Birth out of marriage was considered wrong; ‘The neighbors call you good and pure, Call me an outcast thing’. Society saw Kate as a good person and a good marriage that they accepted into the community. Whilst they considered the cottage maiden as an outcast for having a child out of wedlock. They were also perceived to have a duty to marry and obey their husband; in the bible it says St.Paul in Ephesians 5:22: ‘Wives, be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”Similarly in the Seduction although much more recent, societies view of birth outside marriage especially among teenage pregnancy is still frowned upon. ‘And better, now to turn away, move away, fade away, Than to have the neighbors whisper that ‘you always looked the type.’

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The Seduction reflects a more modern attitude to love, where people frequently meet at social gatherings.’ She met him at the party and danced with him all night’. This shows that relationships can be started without knowing each other, when you are drinking. The poem also shows that men and women are now perceived as equal, in that both men and women are at the party and both are drinking alcohol.

        Messages of love have been interlinked with the environment to help you portray their attitudes towards one another. The setting in the Seduction has been created by using imagery ...

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