Cousin Kate notes

A first-person narrative

The poem is told from the viewpoint of an unnamed narrator: it is a first-person narrative. This poem’s ‘story’ is that the pretty blonde narrator, who is from a humble working family (‘cottage-maiden’) is seduced by a ‘great lord’. When he tires of her he abandons her ‘like a glove’, partly because he has spotted another attractive girl of ‘mean estate’, the narrator’s cousin, Kate.

Because Kate remains ‘good and pure’, and doesn’t allow herself to be seduced, the lord marries her. The bitter (jealous?) narrator, ‘an outcast thing’ in her community, believes (or pretends?), that she has the greater happiness because she has the lord’s child whereas Kate is childless.

The moral tone

The moral tone of this poem is strange. Is Rossetti really suggesting, against the grain of conventional Victorian thinking and the belief of her own church, that the narrator is better off than Kate? Marriage was supposed to be at the heart of Victorian life and what every girl wanted. Think carefully about this and look closely at the poem for evidence.

Because there is considerable moral ambivalence in this poem Rossetti gives the narrator several oxymorons (two apparently contradictory words used together) Consider the effect of:

‘shameless shameful’     and         ‘my shame, my pride’

Consider the sexual significance of:

‘He wore me like a golden knot’

‘He changed me like a glove.’

Rossetti was quite unable to be sexually explicit, but does she make her meaning clear? If so how? Do you find it repugnant? Are you meant to?

Notice Rossetti’s use of strong verbs in ‘Cousin Kate’. Most are single-syllable words derived from Old English rather than from Latin or French, such as ‘lured’ ‘chose’, ‘cast’ and ‘howled.’ Do you think such lexical choices contribute to the poem’s bitter tone because they are direct and unequivocal?

Rhyme and rhythm

Study Rossetti’s rhyme and rhythm and work out why ‘Cousin Kate’ is effective as poetry. She could – in theory – have used the same subject matter as the basis of a short story.

What do you think about the six-verse/eight-line structure and the fluid rhyme pattern which become more fixed as the poem progresses and the narrator becomes more assertive? You will definitely need to comment on this in an examination essay

Questions to get you thinking:

1     What is the symbolic significance of the word ‘dove’?

(Remember: a symbol is something standing for something else such as the Union flag representing Britain or a wedding ring as a sign of marriage)

2     What do you notice about the sound pattern in ‘So now I moan like an unclean thing’? Look at the vowel sounds. Make sure you know what onomatopoeia is (and that you can spell it!) and what assonance is. What effect do they have here? How do they influence the way you think the voice is saying the line?

3     Whom does the narrator blame for her predicament? How does Rossetti convey this?

4     Victorian poets often resorted to archaic language and word forms. Are there any examples here and if so why are they used and to what effect?

5     The narrator is unnamed. What is the effect of this and how does it affect the reader’s response to her? By contrast Kate is named three times in the poem and once in the title.