Comparing and contrasting the two poems: 'Cousin Kate' and 'The Seduction'.

Temel Adil 10TA

Coursework

Essay

My essay is going to be about comparing and contrasting the two poems: ‘Cousin Kate’ and ‘The Seduction’. I have read the two poems thoroughly and researched the authors. ‘Cousin Kate’ is about a young maid who serves the Lord. The Lord leads on the maid and has sex with her for his own pleasure. The maid thinks the Lord is going to marry her but he does not. The maid’s cousin – Kate marries the Lord instead. The maid becomes pregnant and has a child out of wedlock. This makes her a social outcast. ‘The Seduction’ is about a teenage girl who has one night-stand with a boy after an all night party. The teenage girl becomes pregnant and everyone in the neighbourhood sees her as a social outcast.

These poems have many things in common. For example they both have female authors. In both poems, the maid and the girl both feel betrayed because the girl in ‘The Seduction’ says that she feels betrayed by her magazines and I quote ‘And she ripped up all her My Guy magazines and her Jackie photo comics until they were just bright paper like confetti’. In ‘Cousin Kate’ the maid feels betrayed by the Lord because the Lord uses her and dumps her for her cousin Kate, ‘you grew more fairer than I: He saw you at your father’s gate, chose you and pass me by’. Further more, both of the women have a child out of wedlock. In Christina Rossetti’s time, it was wrong to have a child out of wedlock and I can prove this by ‘The neighbours call you good and pure and call me an outcast thing’. In Eileen McAuley’s time, it isn’t that bad because there are teenagers having babies all over the place. I know that in ‘The Seduction’ had a child out of wedlock and that she hated it because she said it was ‘better to starve yourself that to walk through town with a belly huge and ripe’.

This is a preview of the whole essay

The two poems are also different in many ways. One of the differences is that the protagonist in ‘The Seduction’ is a sixteen year old girl doing her O levels ‘was the summer of her sixteenth year’ and ‘about her O levels she’d be sitting in June’. Whereas the protagonist in ‘Cousin Kate’ is a maid for the Lord. I know this because the poem reads ‘I was a cottage maiden’. Furthermore, there is another difference. The girl in ‘The Seduction’ hates her baby whereas the maid in ‘Cousin Kate’ accepts her child. I back this up by ‘better to starve yourself, like a sick precious child than to walk through town with a belly huge and ripe’ this is what the protagonist thinks of her baby in ‘The Seduction’. In ‘Cousin Kate’ the protagonist says her child is ‘my shame, my pride’. There is also another difference between the two poems. The two poems were written in different times. ‘The Seduction’ was written in the 20th century whereas ‘Cousin Kate’ was written in the 19th century. This can create different views towards the poems.

The mood of the poems are depressing yet interesting. At the start of ‘The Seduction’ the mood is a hopeful mood. Sentences like this make the mood hopeful – ‘she had met him at the party and he had danced with her all night’. Later on in ‘The Seduction’ the mood became depressing and betrayal came into the poem. The protagonist in ‘The Seduction’ felt betrayed, ‘full of glossy horoscopes and glamour with a stammer; full of fresh diets – hoe did she feel betrayed’. In ‘Cousin Kate’, the begging of the poem, the maid sleeps with the Lord thinking that he is going to marry her ‘He lured me to his palace home – woe’s me for joy thereof’. The Lord ended up marrying her cousin. The maid felt used in ‘Cousin Kate’, ‘He wore me like a silken knot, He changed me like a glove’.

The languages in the two poems are both different. I think because ‘Cousin Kate’ was written in the 19th century and ‘The Seduction’ was written in the 20th century so the language was more modern in ‘The Seduction’. Christina Rossetti used words such as ‘changed me like a glove’ to describe how the Lord used her in ‘Cousin Kate’. I found this effective because it is a good metaphor and it makes the Lord sound like a user. The language used in ‘The Seduction’ was not as standard as the language used in ‘Cousin Kate’. The language used in ‘The Seduction’ paints a bleak picture of the night events. The poet Eileen McAuley uses settings such as ‘Birkenhead Docks’ to create the image that the setting is not romantic. The language makes me feel interested in the poem and allows me to get into the poem thoroughly.

‘The Seduction’ was a much longer poem than ‘Cousin Kate’. ‘The Seduction’ has 16 stanzas whereas ‘Cousin Kate’ has 5 stanzas. The stanzas in ‘The Seduction’ has 4 lines that every other line rhymed. ‘Cousin Kate’ has random lines in each stanza and a random rhyming pattern.

Finally I come to my conclusion. To be honest I preferred ‘The Seduction’ it reflects how teenagers get pregnant so easily. These days teenage pregnancies are at a record high and people do not take any notice anymore whereas in Christina Rossetti’s day it was a disgrace to have a child out of wedlock. It can also depend on the situation. That concludes my essay.

Temel Adil 10TA