Speaker
While the speaker shares a number of intimate details about herself with the reader, she never reveals her name. She describes herself as having once been a pretty and innocent child from a rural background before catching the attention of a wealthy lord. The lord ultimately rejected her in favor of her cousin, using her for sexual purposes and fathering her child, and therefore destroying her reputation. The speaker is a slippery character, clearly suffering unfairly and yet somewhat unreliable and mysterious. Her description of herself as a deeply pure and innocent person, for instance, draws readers to wonder whether she might have betrayed her cousin if given the chance. Her revelation that she has a son, which emerges only in the poem's last lines, reveals her to be both more powerful and more powerless than she has previously hinted.
Kate
Kate, the speaker's cousin, is the second-person addressee of most of the poem. The speaker implies that she and Kate were once not only close, but similar. Kate, however, grew to exceed her cousin in terms of both her physical beauty and her reputation for moral goodness and feminine virtue. As a result, she was selected as the lord's wife. In a cruel turn of events, her new status as an aristocratic wife causes her to be considered even more virtuous and beautiful, while her cousin the speaker suffers not only material poverty and romantic rejection but a general rejection by society. Moreover, Kate remains impassive in the face of her husband's cruelty, allowing her cousin to suffer while she thrives. Still, the poem's final lines prompt sympathy for Kate: she lacks a child, the single thing that seems to cement the lord's loyalty. Even she is at the mercy of an unequal marriage and a punishing set of standards.
The lord
While the poem portrays Kate as a complex character, both victimizing the speaker and experiencing her own variety of victimhood, the nobleman she marries is an unmitigated villain. The most important element of his characterization is his enormous power. Kate and the speaker are rivals for his attention, fighting over a scarce resource. His own decisions about how to distribute his attention can ruin or alter the lives around him, yet he is wildly impulsive about his relationships, embracing the speaker and then rejecting her as if on a whim. In fact, he appears motivated less y real cruelty than by a total lack of care or awareness regarding his own power over other people.
The Son
Cousin Kate has obvious advantages over the speaker: marriage to the lord and the status, attention, wealth, and security that come with it. This all reasonably causes the speaker to resent and envy her cousin. But the poem ends with an unexpected reversal of the power differential between the women when the speaker announces that she and the lord have a child together. In some ways, the child—whose age is not revealed—is less of a character in his own right than he is a plot device injecting complexity into the poem's love triangle. The final stanza can be read as a warning to Kate and a reminder of the speaker's source of power over her, since she is the mother and guardian of the child who may one day be the lord's heir.
