Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they and the other people have towards it. In what ways do the poems seem typical of the period in which they were written?

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Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they and the other people have towards it.  In what ways do the poems seem typical of the period in which they were written?

        The two poems “Cousin Kate” by Christina Rossetti and “The Seduction” by Eileen McAuley, although written nearly a century and a half apart, have some similar features.

In “Cousin Kate”, the narrator is taken from her cottage life, where she was content, and goes to live with the Lord in his Manor.  She then is overlooked for her cousin Kate, hence the name of the poem, who the Lord prefers.  The neighbours and people around her disapprove of pre-marital relations and call her unclean, whereas because Kate is “innocent”, the Lord marries her.  The poem ends with the Narrator talking about her son.

        In “The Seduction”, the girl goes to a party and meets a boy there.  He buys her drinks and dances with her all night, and she falls in love with him and he gets her drunk, then he takes her to the docks.  The girl ends up pregnant, but she doesn’t find out until three months later.

        The poems both start out with two girls, of roughly the same age.  They are both innocent.  The two men are however, quite different.  The Lord is probably quite a lot older than the boy at the party, and he uses his money and his land to attract the Narrator to his manor, whereas the boy “flirts” with the girl, he pays her attention and dances with her, to make her feel special and make her think he loves her.  Both male characters show a similar attitude to the women because neither is in love with the girl at the centre of the poem. “The Seduction” shows that the boy doesn’t really love the girl because at the docks, he calls her a “little slag”.  The Lord in “Cousin Kate” obviously didn’t love the Narrator because he used her, then took Kate instead, “He wore me like a silken knot, He changed me like a glove” he used her as a “trophy wife” then when he was bored of her, he just cast her aside.  

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The Narrator seems happy to have her baby, because she says “Yet I’ve a gift you have not got” which implies that the child is something to boast about and something she’s happy that she has, and a gift, or blessing, whereas the girl in “The Seduction” doesn’t have her baby during the poem, but she says “Better to destroy your life in modern, man-made ways, Than to fall into this despicable, feminine void” which shows that she thinks it’s better to take drugs than be pregnant.  This shows a complete contrast in the feminine attitude because the Narrator has ...

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