Cousin Kate and The Seduction

             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.