The portrait of them asleep – "Golden head by golden head/Like two pigeons in one nest/ Folded in each other's wings" – conveys their symbiotic closeness. She regains her health overnight, and the tale ends, for both sisters, in contentment and motherhood.īesides the power of womanly solidarity, some readings find an expressly lesbian eroticism. Laura sucks the juice, finding it newly bitter. Subsequently Lizzie finds her way home, her face "syruped" with juice from the fruits the goblins tried to force-feed her. In the passages I've chosen, we see her resistance and punishment. The goblins try to insist she devour the fruit in front of them. Lizzie, who still hears the sales-pitch, sets out with a penny to buy fruit to cure her sister.
Now unable to hear the goblins' cries (because no longer a maiden, is the implication) she begins to sicken and age. Laura returns home, sated but longing for more. Lizzie's warnings reiterate the fate of Jeanie, a young bride-to-be who died after tasting the fruit prematurely, before her marriage. The tale clearly invites an allegorical reading. Lizzie instinctively fears and resists them, but Laura barters a curl of her golden hair in exchange for a feast. The sisters in the poem, Lizzie and Laura, are tempted by the magical and dangerous fruit the goblins sell as they trudge along the glenside. Christina dedicated the poem to her own elder sister, Maria, and perhaps the tribute encodes some shared memory Even more startling is the depiction of the sinister little goblins themselves: "One tramped at a rat's pace/One crawled like a snail/One like a wombat prowled, obtuse and furry/ One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry." If there's any dull moment, it's not until the last verse, which unfurls a homely happy ending around its un-especial moral, "For there is no friend like a sister.", reminding us that Goblin Market may have been conceived as a children's poem.
There's the long wishlist of fruit at the beginning, of course: "Bright-fire-like barberries/ Figs to fill your mouth/Citrons from the South…" reminding us of Christina's Italian ancestry. Many brilliant "set pieces" make selection difficult. Rossetti allows herself the full freedom of her poetic gifts: her visual sense, her musicality, her skill in both narrative and lyric modes.
Often read as a poem of renunciation – as perhaps all Rossetti's poems fundamentally are – Goblin Market is also a wonderful fairytale from a writer who was not so far away from her own childhood when she completed it in April 1859. This week's choice is an extract: lines 408–446 from Christina Rossetti's lavishly sensuous masterpiece, Goblin Market.
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