The poem begins with:
“Not mindful I was fair
Why did the great lord find me out
And praise my flaxen hair?
Why did the great lord find me out
To fill my heart with care?”
The cottage maiden emphasises: “Why did the great lord find me out” by repeating it twice.
In the second stanza Cristina Rossetti explains how the lord lured her to his palace, and just used her as a fashion accessory. The same thing happens in modern day life, people would much rather walk round the streets with a slim and beautiful woman, rather than an obese and ugly woman. After using the cottage maiden he then discards her and shoves her aside: “He wore me like a glove” she also explains hoe everyone knew about her unmarried affair, and she is now “an unclean thing” which is powerful language. The cottage maiden thinks that she “might have been a dove.” This is a metaphor and is used to show that she wishes she were pure and innocent again.
As the poem progresses the cottage maiden tells us how her love for the lord was true, and how cousin Kate’s love was only for his power:
“He’d not have won me with his love
Nor bought me with his land
I would have spit in his face
And not have taken his hand.”
This is talking to cousin Kate and saying the cottage maiden wouldn’t marry him no matter what he gave her.
In the final stanza, we find out that the cottage maiden has a son, and is proud and ashamed of him at the same time. This is ironic because the lord wants a son to give his land to, cousin Kate cannot conceive and therefore the lord has made a drastic mistake.
“The Seduction” is concerned with a teenager, who became infatuated with a boy at a party. They go to a secluded area when the teenage girl is drunk, the boy takes advantage, and has sex with her. The girl describes the boy as a disgrace to society because he smokes, drinks, read pornography and sniffs solvents. When the girl finds out she’s pregnant she rips up all of the magazines that she thought love was all about.
The poem begins with the girl being taken to the docks, which is a secluded area: “After the party, early Sunday morning he led her to the quiet bricks of Birken head docks. Far from the blind windows of the tower blocks.” There are pictorial metaphors in this stanza.
In the ninth stanza, Eileen McCauley Explains how the teenage girl is angry and shows regret about getting pregnant: “And the day, she broke the heels of her high white shoes (as she flung them at the wall) Which shows that she wants to be innocent like she was before.
As the poem progresses the poem tells us about the boy who has taken advantage of the teenage girl. It describes him as a disgrace because he truants school and takes drugs.
In the final stanza, the girl describes how she feels about its better to be anorexic than to be pregnant at her age: “Better to starve yourself, like a sick precocious child Than to walk through town with a belly huge and ripe.” She also thinks that the neighbours will think that she always “looked the type”.
In conclusion the problems of men using women as sex objects has never changed, the women has sex with the men and in return they get nothing. The poems are very similar even though they were written in different centuries.
By
Brad Morton
