Summary
The speaker tells Kate that, while her own love was true, Kate's was passing at best. Furthermore, if the situation were reversed so that Kate rather than the speaker was the victim, the speaker believes she never would have allowed the situation to continue. Rather than stay by the lord's side and reap the advantages of the marriage, she would have left him in anger. Even so, with all her gifts and status, Kate lacks one thing that the speaker has. The speaker addresses her own son, instructing him to cling to her. She addresses him at once as "my shame" and "my pride." She tells him that his father—the lord—would give up even the lands he owns for the sake of the child.
Analysis
Over the course of the previous stanzas, a question arose: would the speaker, who once wanted to marry the lord just like her cousin has done, ever have behaved like Kate? Here, she claims, in vivid language, that she would not have done so, arguing that she would have "spit into his face" had he harmed Kate. She also claims provocatively that Kate doesn't actually love her husband, insinuating that she has betrayed the speaker and married the lord only for money and status. It's difficult to tell how reliable our narrator is by this point. Whether she would have selflessly protected Kate, and whether Kate is faking her love for the lord, are open to the reader's interpretation. What is evident is that the lord's behavior has driven a terrible wedge and created inequality between two women who were seemingly once close. If the speaker's testimony is reliable, the situation is all the worse, since the lord has apparently given Kate power to abandon and betray her relatively blameless cousin. If the speaker isn't reliable, that's just as bad: the lord has made her life so difficult that she can no longer think clearly.
The speaker consistently portrays herself as helpless, but at the end of the poem, in a last-minute twist, she reveals herself to be more powerful than previously acknowledged—albeit in an odd, complex way. The revelation, of course, is that she has had a child with the lord while Kate does not. The implication is that, regardless of which woman the lord prefers, the speaker has a specific type of leverage in the form of their child. As she reveals with the line "my shame, my pride," the child holds a multifaceted significance. He is a source of power for the narrator, and also, she suggests, a source of dignity and joy: if Kate truly doesn't love her husband, then the speaker has in some ways won out because of her own love for her son. Even so, the child is a reminder and a visible sign of the lord's overarching power and callousness.
Rossetti engineers this twist cleverly, by having the speaker not only bring up a new topic but address a new listener. Whereas she opened the poem by speaking about the lord in the third person, and then shifted to addressing Kate in the second person, she now addresses her son. The shift in address makes the revelation of the son far more sensational than it would be otherwise, especially since he appears to be physically present with her: the speaker tells him to "cling closer." This causes readers to reevaluate the speaker's own situation, since we now have to picture her sharing the scene with a child. Moreover, these shifts in address offer insight into the power dynamics between the characters. The speaker talks to her son instructively while sharing a physical space with him, establishing their relationship as close and intimate. She also speaks to Kate, but at what seems like more of a distance, as if unable to actually have a conversation with her. This reflects the duality of their relationship, which bears remnants of closeness but is now distant. As for the lord, while he is mentioned frequently, the speaker never actually addresses him. His power over her makes him inaccessible, so that the speaker can never actually make her feelings known to the man who has caused her so much suffering.
