Introduction…
During this essay I will be comparing two poems, both written by women, and both have same theme, the poems were written a century apart and are written about woman who were taken advantage of by a man, both women in the poems become pregnant and keep the child.
The poem “Cousin Kate” was written in the 19th century by a poet named Christina Georgina Rossetti, it portrays a story of chastity and double standards. It demonstrates how life was for women working in jobs such as a maiden in the eighteen hundreds, and how higher figures in society used their wealth and status to take advantage of them. A lord tricks the maid into having sex, and gets her pregnant, then later marries her “Cousin Kate”, who cannot have children, “Yet I’ve a gift you have not got, and seem not like to get.” She speaks kindly of Kate at the beginning and then gets bitter by verse 5. The maid knows that the lord would give everything he had to have a child and she is not sorry for what happened because the lord was not honorable to her and used her. Even though she is the victim she is the one that the neighbors call “an outcast thing” Where as her cousin Kate is spoken of as “good and pure” and because Cousin Kate did not have sex with the lord he married her.
