Cousin Kate and The Seduction

The narrator in “Cousin Kate” is enticed by a Lord into his home. They have a relationship and the narrator becomes pregnant. We are not told whether the lord is aware of the pregnancy, but he swaps the narrator “like a glove” for her younger, more fair cousin, Kate.

The girl in “The Seduction” goes to a friend’s party and meets a boy. The girl gets drunk on vodka as she “knocked it back like water,” and the boy takes advantage of her. She also becomes pregnant and tears up her comics that h

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.

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.

The girls in both the poems lose their virginity and become pregnant, the narrator in “Cousin Kate” was a “cottage maiden”, showing the reader that she was a female virgin. The narrator in “The Seduction” does not tell the reader directly that she was a virgin, but from the way she acted about her pregnancy and how drunk and “nervous” she was, it is implied. Both of the girls in some way regret what happened, they cry and feel “unclean”. The men by whom they were seduced used tools, the lord used his money and the boy used alcohol. This shows the reader that the narrators were not in love with the boys for the person they were at first. Neither of the poems tell us the name of the narrator, which coul

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