The poems ask rhetorical questions “Why did the great Lord find me out, and praise my flaxen hair?” and “For where, now, was the summer of her sixteenth year?” This could be a sign of distress and despair. We find out at the end of both poems that the girls are looked down upon and shamed by the neighbors or local people, whereas we do not hear about the Lord or boy being disgraced.
The reason the narrator in “Cousin Kate” is disgraced is because she had sex before marriage, which was frowned upon in the decade that the poem is set. “The neighbours call [Cousin Kate] good and pure, call [the narrator] and outcast thing.”
The neighbours in “The Seduction” “whisper that [she] always looked the type”, and disgrace her because she had had sex with a boy she did not know, and had become pregnant. The two teenagers did not have a relationship at all, and did not love each other. We are told that she fell in love with “his eyes as blue as iodine, with the fingers that stroked her neck and thighs, and the kisses that tasted of nicotine.” One the night of the party, the girl fell in love with the idea of being in love, not with the boy. The boy did not love her either, he allows the girl to become drunk, and calls her a “little slag”, showing the reader he has no respect at all for the girl. He “swiftly contrived to kiss her” which is not romantic, making the reader believe that he is only with her for his own pleasure and bravado.
The relationship in “Cousin Kate” between the narrator and the lord seems quite caring, the narrator loved the Lord and it appeared to her that the Lord felt the same. He praised her “flaxen hair” and filled her “heart with care”. We find out in the next stanza all the harmful things he did. The narrator was “lured” to his palace home, where she “lead a shameless shameful life”. He wore her for decoration because of her beauty and changed her “like a glove” for someone younger. We are made to feel pity for the narrator; she did love him, so much so that she felt it was acceptable to break the local taboo of sex out of wedlock.
Both girls become pregnant because of the Lord and the boy. The narrator in “Cousin Kate” appears to love her child, and seems boastful in the way that she talks to her cousin about it, “Yet I’ve a gift you have not got, and seem not like to get.” The mood here is triumphant because she knows that she has got what the lord wants most, something which her cousin cannot give, ‘your father would give lands for one to wear his coronet’ She says this to her son, because she knows that this is what the lord wants most, an heir, and her cousin is infertile and cannot give it to him. This is also ironic because the one thing that he wants, he had, but he cast it away. The girl he chose, Cousin Kate, cannot give him a child because she is infertile. So this gives the cottage maiden some comfort that she knows this and he does not, it therefore gives her power over him and her cousin Kate.
The narrator tells us what she would have said and done to the Lord if she had been in Kate’s position. There is loyalty in the narrator when she says she would have “spit in his face and not have taken his hand.” Whether she would really have acted like this, we do not know, but the reader is made to believe that she wishes cousin Kate had done that, perhaps showing a hint of jealousy. The beginning of the poem is in past tense, “I was a cottage maiden.” The narrator is looking back, at this point, to what her life was like before she had met the Lord. This poem at no point refers to the feelings of Cousin Kate or the Lord.
The narrator in “The Seduction” seems extremely distraught about her pregnancy. She rips up all her “My Guy and her Jackie photo-comics” and breaks the heels of the high white shoes which she had worn that night. To the reader, it seems like she is trying to destroy the memories and what happened the night of the party. The girl realises that she is “truly frightened” and “cheated” by the promises only tacitly made in her comics. The comics show pictures of girls that are happy with their boyfriends, and stories that tell the teenage readers that everything will work itself out. The girl at the beginning of the story goes out of her way to look beautiful, to be more mature and grown up. Whereas now that she is pregnant, she does not wish to grow up, she wants to stay “innocent”.
The girl looks back on her life before she met the boy, and tells the reader what her life could have been like. She talks about day trips to Blackpool and “jumping all the rides”, now that she was pregnant she could not do either of these. “She cried that she had missed all the innocence around her” because having this baby would change her life, she would have to grow up quicker and so miss all the fun teenage years. The narrator talks about ways she thinks would be better to ruin her life than having a baby. She believes that it would be better to smoke “scented drugs” and “starve yourself, like a sick, precocious child” than to be in the “feminine void” of pregnancy. The narrator is obviously extremely distressed about her situation; the reader is made to believe that she has not yet told her parents or even the boy of the pregnancy.
Many things in “Cousin Kate” make it recognisable as having being written in the Victorian era. The obvious one is the archaic language used, “Woe’s me for joy thereof” is a perfect example. In modern day English it can be translated to mean “How sad I am that I was joyful about it.” The people described in the poem are also a clue to the era in which it was written, there is a Lord and a cottage maiden. Also the way the neighbours react to a pregnancy out of wedlock, nowadays this is quite common. The narrator was “not mindful [she] was fair.” This is an old way of saying she did not know she was pretty, whereas the girl in “The Seduction” went out of her way the make herself look beautiful. This is also a difference between the attitudes of Victorian girls and girls of the 20th Century. The expression “little slag” used in “The Seduction” is also very common for its era, whereas the curse words in the era of “Cousin Kate” would be less abusive and harsh. A peculiar rhyme scheme is used in “Cousin Kate”. Every other line in each stanza rhymes, whereas the rhyme scheme in “The Seduction” is not bound to a rule. In some stanzas, the second and forth lines rhyme, but in others, the first, third and fourth lines rhyme.
The setting of the poems also shows the reader the time the poem was set. “Cousin Kate” lived in a cottage and worked “among the rye”. “The Seduction” is set at a friends party and also by “The Mersey, green as a septic wound.” The filth and dirt of the location mirrors the way the boy treats her and the way the girl feels afterwards.
Things about at the two poems which are no different despite the gap of nearly a century and a half between them are the position the girls are in. They are both either pregnant or have a baby, both of the fathers do not love the girls. The girls both loved the males at the time although in someway regret what they did.
There are boy problems involved even though the men in the poems were of a different class; in ‘Cousin Kate’ the man was a very upper class lord whereas the man in ‘The seduction’ was working class ‘He spat into the river, fumbled in a bag’. These poems both contain different aspects of deceit. “Cousin Kate” because of the Lord leaving her for the younger cousin, and “The Seduction” because of the lies in the girls comics.
