Purity
One of the causes for the speaker's situation, and at the same time one of the worst consequences of it, is her reputation for being "impure" in terms of sexual experience. At first, though she is not considered promiscuous or otherwise impure, she fails to live up to the punishing standards of her society as well as her cousin does. Kate, being considered the purer of the two, is rewarded by becoming the lord's wife. The speaker, deemed less fit for marriage, is punished for her perceived sexual impurity by becoming oversexualized and exploited. This, in a particularly cruel catch, causes others to reject her because they see her as impure and promiscuous. Worse yet, the lord never faces the same scrutiny for his actions, insulated by both his nobility and his gender. Rosetti therefore critiques both the hypocrisy of this particular standard and the irrationality of the speaker's punishment for her perceived impurity. This particular theme, while cloaked in the poem's fairytale-like setting, would have had particular resonance with Rossetti's Victorian readers, who also lived in a period of intricate and unequal social norms regarding sexuality and gender.
Betrayal
For the speaker, the lord's rejection seems to sting less than Kate's, because Kate's is perceived as an especially sudden and unexpected betrayal. While the lord's capriciousness and capacity for unfairness are expected, indifference and abandonment by a family member—one with whom the speaker once enjoyed a friendship, or at least a relationship of equality—is a harder pill to swallow. In fact, the speaker feels even more distressed about Kate's abandonment because she knows just how easily their situations might have been reversed. Kate's betrayal causes the speaker to question her own principles and values. She asserts that she would not have allowed herself to betray Kate, but the fact of the lord's power over both women makes it seem possible that she, too, might have given up her cousin to marry him.
Inequality and Power
Inequality occurs along two distinct but intertwined axes in this poem. The first of these axes is gender, while the second is status. The lord, because of both the fact that he is a man and the fact that he is an aristocrat, is able to exercise an enormous amount of control over the lives of the other characters in the poem. Meanwhile, because Kate and the speaker are both women as well as lower-caste workers, they can gain power and safety only insofar as they can establish relationships with the lord. The most extreme evidence of this inequality is the lord's ability, not only to get what he wants without consequences, but to transfer the consequences of his actions onto other people. Therefore, despite the fact that he has harmed the speaker, it is the speaker whose reputation suffers: the lord is able to sever the ties between her and her neighbors. Similarly, the speaker's anger over her situation is overwhelmingly directed, not towards the lord, but towards her cousin.
Love
Three types of love appear in this poem, all of them troubled and compromised by the lord's power over other characters. One type is romantic. The speaker argues that her own love for the lord is true, but it is also unrequited and has led her to experience pain and loss. Meanwhile, she casts doubt on the authenticity of her cousin's love for the lord. In both cases, the massive material and reputational advantages of marrying the lord make it impossible to know who truly loves him and why. The second type of love is familial. Kate and the speaker have grown up sharing a certain solidarity and intimacy that comes from being in the same family and therefore having similar experiences and opportunities. However, the lord also manages to cleave the two of them apart by offering only one of them the chance at a better life, breeding resentment and suspicion. The last type of love is parental. The speaker's love for her child, while it appears genuine, is also very much clouded by the fact that he is a source of leverage in her relationship with the lord. He offers her a connection to the aristocrat that Kate lacks, which makes him a tool as much as a recipient of maternal affection.
