A cottage girl seduced and abandoned by a lord who then marries her cousin, told in her own bitter voice, ending with her son.
How Victorian ideas of fallen women, class and marriage shape the poem, and how its ballad-like stanzas, rhyme, imagery and address to Kate work.
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', 'He lured me to his palace home', 'His plaything and his love', 'He wore me like a silken knot, / He changed me like a glove', 'So now I moan, an unclean thing', 'Chose you, and cast me by', 'Call me an outcast thing', 'Your love was writ in sand', 'My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride'.
Form: six eight-line stanzas like a ballad, with rhymes on alternate lines; questions, similes and contrasts such as dust and gold; the turn when she speaks to Kate directly, and the final stanza, where her son becomes her one advantage.
Context: Rossetti's first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862); her work with fallen women at a refuge in Highgate; the Victorian fallen woman, shut out of respectable society once she lost her chastity while the lord who seduced her keeps his place; class, marriage and children born outside it.
Compares well with: Kamikaze on shame and being shunned; Catrin on a mother and her child; Sonnet 29 and Dusting the Phone on love and longing; Origin Story on love that lasts or does not.
