'Cousin Kate' and 'The Seduction' Analysis

English Coursework – Poem Analysis

“Cousin Kate” by Christina Rossetti
“The Seduction” by Eileen McAuley

Compare what happens to the two girls and the attitudes they and other people have towards it. In what ways do the poems seem typical of the period they were written?

The two poems focus on similar events in women’s lives, even though the two poems were written approximately 125 years apart. They both seem to identify with the ‘narrator’ of the poem even though Christina Rossetti definitely led a comfortable middle/upper class life in a city in Victorian England. Both poems were written by women, unusual in itself, but maybe that is why the poems identify with their subject so well.

The Seduction by Eileen McAuley is a poem of ‘clumsy teenage angst’. The reader is informed of the events on one particular night, and then the narrator’s feelings afterwards – the consequences. The narrator is a young girl in her teens, who goes to a party, dreaming ...