Goblin Market
By Christina Rossetti
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?
Christina Georgina Rossetti
 Born December 5, 1830
 Father became an invalid when she was an adolescent and her own health declined
 Canceled plans for marriage twice over religious scruples (never married)
 Circle of acquaintances included her brothers’ friends Swinburne, Whistler, and Charles
Dodgson
 Lived a quiet life – a lot of charity work
 Died December 29, 1894
Rossetti often criticized the conventional representation of women in pre-Raphaelite art, and
tension is seen between a love of art and beauty and religious severity.
Virginia Wolf noted this combination of the sensual and the severe:
“Your poems are full of gold dust and “sweet geraniums’ varied brightness”; your eye noted
incessantly how rushes are “velvet headed,” and lizards have a “strange metallic mail” – your
eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina
the Anglo-Catholic. But to her you owed perhaps the fixity and sadness of your muse…. No
sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain
and beauty passes. Death, oblivion, and rest lap around your songs with their dark wave.”
Sandra M. Gilbert asserted that Rossetti created “an aesthetics of renunciation,” writing poetry of
deferral, negation, and constraint.
Goblin Market
 Published in “Goblin Market and Other Poems” in 1862
o First literary success of the pre-Raphaelites (with its simple style and affinity with
the goals of the group – combination of realistic style with elaborate symbolism)
o Contained different poetic modes – pure lyric, narrative fable, ballad, and
devotional verse (she would eventually turn to this form in later years)
 Most scholars agree that “Goblin Market” is the best poem of the group, and of her work
as a whole
 Rich and vivid visual imagery
K. Considine - 21 Aug 2010
Summary
Every morning and evening (twilight), sisters Laura and
Lizzie hear the goblin men calling them to buy their fruits.
Lizzie covers her eyes and ears, but Laura looks and listens.
When Lizzie leaves, Laura stays behind and ends up buying
some goblin fruit, paying for it with a lock of her hair.
When Laura returns home after gorging herself on goblin fruits in a sensual feast, Lizzie
admonishes her with the tale of Jeannie, a girl in the village who accepted the fruits of the goblin
men and is now dead. Laura begins to crave the fruit, but she can no longer hear the cries of the
goblin men or see them selling their wares. She begins to sicken and waste away, and will not
eat real food for want of the fairy food. Lizzie, realizing her sister is near death, takes a silver
penny and goes to the goblin men to buy some fruit for her sister. The goblin men are furious
she wants to pay and take the fruit and not feast with
Never mind my bruises,
them. They hit and claw her; throw fruit at her and
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
mash it in her hair and all over her body. Lizzie goes
Squeez'd from goblin fruits for you,
home covered in the juices of the goblin fruit and
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Laura sucks the juices off her sister. Laura goes
Eat me, drink me, love me;
through a kind of violent exorcism and falls into a
Laura, make much of me;
deep sleep. The next morning, she awakens healthy
For your sake I have braved the glen
and revitalized and free of the goblin curse, and later
And had to do with goblin merchant men.
tells the story of her fall to her and her sister’s
children.
Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Themes
“Themes of frustrated love and an understated tension between desire and renunciation characterize
her more serious work. Separated lovers often appear in her poems, and regret for life unfulfilled
alternates with what one critic calls a death wish. But there is another strain in some of her poetry
that can be called Gothic or even macabre--goblins, serpents, wombats, ratels, and lizards turn up in
her verses.” (The Victorian Web)
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Female Sexuality and the Forbidden Fruit
Biblical References to the Fall
Parallels and Resemblances to Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Discourse of Consumption and Redemption
Critique of the Fairy Tale genre
Doubling
Innocence vs. Experience
The Female Hero
o Sisterhood
"For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands."
Sources:
Abrams, M.H. and Stephen Greenblatt, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Seventh Ed. Vol 2. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. Print.
Victorianweb.org. Web. 19 Aug 2010
For a list of short articles on how other authors compare/contrast with Rossetti, see:
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/litrel.html
K. Considine - 21 Aug 2010