Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Goblin Market
British
Realism
Christina Rossetti was born the youngest child in a famous and accomplished family of artists, poets and scholars. Educated at home, she was by nature reserved and pious, like her mother. A devout evangelical Christian, she rejected suitors she considered not sufficiently serious in their faith. She suffered from neuralgia and angina for much of her life and lived very quietly, working for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and writing mostly devotional poetry.
The long poem “Goblin Market” (1862) is Rossetti’s best known work and is markedly different in style and content from any of her other poems. Published in 1862 and illustrated by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the well-known Pre-Raphael poet, the poem was controversial from the first. While she informed her publisher that the poem was not intended for children, Rossetti often insisted in public that it was intended for children. The plot of the long narrative poem is very similar to a fairy tale: the brave and steadfast sister, Lizzie, saves her impulsive sister Laura from a deadly enchantment that has resulted from Laura succumbing to the temptation of eating goblin fruit. The poem’s dark undertones of sexuality, commodification, and religious ritual have fascinated readers since its publication.
Consider while reading:

1. Note both the description of the fruits the goblin men offer, and their abundance. What is Rossetti suggesting about the fruit here?What’s wrong with it? What’s appealing about it?
2. The climax of the poem is in Lizzie’s sacrificial act on her sister’s behalf. What kinds of associations does the line, “Eat me, drink me, love me” set up?
3. In what way might we describe this poem as an “initiation” experience. Consider especially the last part of the poem and the “moral” of the narrative.

Written by Anita Turlington