Eileen McCauley writes “he led her to the quiet bricks of Birkenhead docks…Far from the blind windows of tower blocks”. The verb “led” shows how the boy is in control of the girl; he is leading her away from the busy city to a quiet place where no one will see them.
Personification is used here when McCauley writes “quiet Bricks” and “blind windows” this emphasises how desolate and secluded the area he is taking her to is, so he can take advantage of her. The simile “the Mersey, green as a septic wound” shows us that the river he has taken her to is not pretty and clean but polluted. The use of pathetic fallacy where the river mirrors the girl’s situation again emphasises that she is in a situation she can’t get out of, “Septic wound” implies that the boy will hurt her.
Overall, the males in both poems are portrayed as being very negative in the way they get their girl, they are very predatory and more experienced than the girls. They are different in that the lord in “Cousin Kate” is very high class and powerful, yet the youth in “The Seduction” is poorly educated and lower class.
Both men are also very much control of the women in the poems, and the situation they are in. the verb “lured” from “Cousin Kate” emphasises the fact that the man is in control of the cottage maiden and he has almost set a trap for the naïve girl to fall into. In comparison to this “The Seduction” also uses negative verbs such as “led” and “take”, this again shows that the boys intentions for the girl are not the best, and he wants to take her to a place where he can take advantage of her innocence.
The Question “why did a great lord find me out/ and praise my flaxen hair?” this tells me that the Lord had picked out the cottage maiden because she was attractive, and then dumped her when he discovered her prettier cousin Kate. The way the maiden uses the adjective “great” to describe the lord implies that he is powerful and rich. The verb “praise” shows how he complimented and flattered her to get what he wanted.
The use of rhetorical questions in the first stanza emphasises how ignorant the cottage maiden is to her beauty, and how innocent she is, the lord uses this against her to take advantage of her.
“She met him at the party and danced with him all night” is from “The Seduction” this shows that the boy gave the girl all his attention to get her to fall for him, so he could take advantage of her. The boy talks to her all night “about the football, Sammy lee and Ian rush” this shows that the boy doesn’t really care about her, and only talks about subjects that would interest him, or other boys, This also tells me that he isn’t as experienced with girls as he tries to show. The girl “nodded quite enchanted and her eyes were wide and bright” this shows me that the girl is not only under the influence of alcohol, but she in under his influence.
The lord in “cousin Kate” seduces the “flaxen” haired cottage maiden. She is innocent in the knowledge of her beauty and her head is turned by his acknowledgement of this, and she is taken in by his charms.
In “The Seduction” the youth does not flatter his prey but more bamboozles her with talk of worldly subjects of football and boxing, of which she has no knowledge, thus impressing her, which she finds attractive. Therefore, whilst simultaneously impressing her with his knowledge he also effectively excludes her from his world because of her lack of awareness of theses subjects.
One factor that both men share is there selfish seduction of two innocent and virginal young women. This is a seduction for their own personal gratification with little if any consideration for the young woman involved.
Some emphasis is placed on how the men coerce the women to accompany them although no reference is made in either poem to the sexual act from which both women conceive, McCauley does this here, “He lured me to his palace home” and “he led me to the quiet bricks of Birkenhead docks”.
In “cousin Kate” the poet goes one step further than in “the seduction” in that reference is made to the fragility and disposability of the young woman “his plaything and his love/he wore me like a silken knot/he changed me like a glove”.
In the later dated poem chemicals in the form of iodine and nicotine are referred to as contributing to the act of seduction. The simile “with his eyes as blue as iodine” enhances how toxic and dangerous this boy is. “ kisses that tasted of nicotine” reinforces this. These chemical influences are absent in the earlier dated poem. Further to this the young man in “the seduction” is likely to be under the influences of solvents, “ with a bag full of shimmering sweet paint thinner” which suggests he might not be entirely in control of his actions whereas there is no similar excuse for the behaviour of the lord in the earlier dated poem.
In the poem “the Seduction” the girl who starts telling us her story is very different from the one who ends it. Initially she appears innocent as described by the poet in her use of “wide blue eyes”. Eileen McCauley writes “where a stranger could lead you to bright new worlds” the girl decides to believe that the boy she meets is her stranger. This emphasises her innocence and her trust in the media “full of glitzy fashion features, and stories of romance”, “where were the glossy photographs of summer”, “full of glossy horoscopes and glamour with a stammer, full of fresh fruit diets. How did she feel betrayed”. In reality she was betrayed by both the media and the boy. The adjectives used in these phrases enhance the feeling that everything she believed from the media is fake.
Before she falls under the boys spell a reference is made to “O Levels she’d be sitting in June” this suggests that she wants to make something of herself and become successful. Her innocence is reinforced when she giggles at his first kiss, “his kiss was scented by Listerine and she stifled a giggle”. Reference is also made to teenage magazines which have influenced her through out her adolescence, “reminded of numerous stories from teenage magazines”. This tells me that the girl is naïve and only knows what she has read, she has no real life experiences of this.
In comparison, in the poem “cousin Kate” the cottage maiden had no awareness of her beauty and how appealing that might be to a man. , “not mindful I was fair” this theme is repeated when she says “why did a great lord find me out, and praise my flaxen hair?”. It appears that she had no awareness of his intentions toward her and the potential consequences “he lured me to his palace home, woe’s me for joy thereof”.
The quote “so now I moan an unclean thing, who might have been a dove” tells me that the cottage maiden could have had such a different life.
In the two poems both unfortunate young women find themselves unexpectedly pregnant. The lure of romance and excitement backfires. An oxymoron is used in both poems to emphasise predominant themes “my shame my pride” –“Cousin Kate” and “with a softly rounded belly, she was sickened every morning”- in “the seduction” this dichotomy serves to capture the essence of the delight and disappointment experienced by the two young women in the discovery of their pregnancy.
The cottage maiden sees her pregnancy as a mixed blessing “my pride my shame” whereas the Liverpudlian lass feels her pregnancy has “cheated” her out of “the summer of her sixteenth year”. In “Cousin Kate” the cottage maiden is content and even smug because she has “a gift you have not got” when she refers to the barren status of her successor. This theme is in contrast to “The seduction” in which there is no further reference to the babies father following the conception, the reader is left to assume he has no more to do with the matter. And the young girl is left to look after herself.
“The Seduction” also uses a break in the structure of the poem, this mimics the change in the girls body. She also rips her magazines and breaks her shoes as if they have lied to her and she feels “cheated by the promise of it all”
In the era of “Cousin Kate” a young woman of lower class, living in an rural society would have been expected to work in the fields, as the cottage maiden in “Cousin Kate” did. However, falling pregnant out of marital security puts her in the position of being a drain on, rather than a contributor to the labour force, this might have been frowned upon by the society at this time.
In the political climate in the 1980s it is likely that the girl in Liverpool would have just been measured as another statistic, another teenage pregnancy. Whilst this assumes societies reluctant acceptance of the situation it pays no regard to the feelings of the individual young woman who finds herself single, pregnant, without support. And whose future is compromised.
In “Cousin Kate” the phrase “the neighbours call you good and pure, call me an outcast thing” compares the two woman. This shows that society would accept Cousin Kate because she is an honest woman in a relationship with a respected man; however they will not accept the cottage maiden because her position is socially unacceptable, and this places her apart form society.
The view of society in “the seduction” suggests that it is more socially acceptable to be “smoking scented drugs, or festering visibly unemployed” that to be “in the despicable female void of the teenage unmarried pregnant girl. “Cousin Kate” refers to the cottage maiden as “an unclean thing” when she falls pregnant, her society judged her for carrying an illegitimate child.
Conclusion
To summarise and conclude, the themes of both poems illustrate common threads and subtle differences between the treatment of women and the presentation of men, this is further highlighted by the poems being set in different historical time frames and socio-economic backgrounds, however the outstanding sentiment of both poems is that of the lost potential of the young women who finds herself pregnant and rejected by the society in which she lives. My favourite of the two poems was “The Seduction” I liked this one more because it was a more modern poem and dealt with teenage pregnancy more like it would be viewed today.