![]() ![]() 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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