Cousin Kate — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Cousin Kate
The poems
What you need to know
A cottage girl, seduced and then cast off by a great lord who has married her cousin Kate instead, speaks bitterly to Kate about shame, class and love, and ends by holding up her son as the one gift Kate does not have.
How Rossetti's ballad stanzas, similes of the golden knot and the glove, contrasts of purity and shame, and direct address to Kate show a woman's anger at the lord and her rival and her defiant pride in her child.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I was a cottage-maiden', 'Why did a great lord find me out', 'His plaything and his love', 'He wore me like a golden knot', 'He changed me like a glove', 'Who might have been a dove', 'Call me an outcast thing', 'Your love was writ in sand', 'Yet I've a gift you have not got', 'My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride'.
Form: six eight-line stanzas in ballad metre with one rhyme sound on the even lines of each stanza, a dramatic monologue that tells her story, then turns to address Kate, and in the last stanza turns to her son.
Context: Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) and Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), her first collection sold to the public; her volunteer work from 1859 to 1870 at a London refuge for fallen women in Highgate; the Victorian idea of the fallen woman, shamed for sex outside marriage; and the gulf between rich and poor, and the shame of marrying below one's class.
Compares well with: Catrin (a mother, a child and conflict in relationships), The Class Game (class and being judged) and A Poison Tree (bitterness towards a rival).
