The title poem is a long narrative poem which is often taken for a children’s poem because of its fairy-tale motifs and imagery Rossetti, however, always denied that the poem was intended for children.

It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published, and it was the book that brought her to public attention. Many of her poems engage with the question of religious belief, such as ‘Good Friday’ (a poem about honest religious doubt as much as faith) and ‘Twice’, about the importance of Christian forgiveness and redemption (the poem is spoken by a fallen woman, a theme that can also be seen in ‘Goblin Market’).Ĭhristina Rossetti composed her first poem while still a very young girl she dictated it to her mother. Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830, and lived with her mother virtually all of her life. She was the younger sister (by two years) of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Ultimately there cannot be ‘an’ analysis of ‘Goblin Market’: the poem is too richly various for that, too elusive, its use of fantastical imagery and symbolism not meant to be reduced to simplistic allegory or social commentary.Īnd we can begin to see how the poem made Christina Rossetti a famous name: ‘Goblin Market’ will always prompt endless debates and new analysis, without ever allowing us to pin it down in any neat, manageable sense.Ĭhristina Rossetti (1830-94) was one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most influential poets. In this post we have tried to condense the huge critical debate – and various interpretations – of ‘Goblin Market’ into one short article. That feverishly odd ‘aguish’ has indeed hardened into ‘anguish’, the anguish of the not-known. Who knows? The fruit in the Garden of Eden offered life in the form of pleasure and worldly knowledge (including carnal knowledge, or awareness of one’s own sexuality) but it also led to death, the death of paradise. The eye is apt to stumble over ‘aguish’, wanting to correct it to ‘anguish’ but, like the word itself, we are caught in a feverish world we can only half-comprehend, much less analyse. She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.

Words themselves are unstable, ripe (like the fruit) to enchant us and then unsettle us with their cunning: The unpredictability of the line lengths, rhymes, and rhythms of ‘Goblin Market’ echoes the unpredictable fairy-tale world of the goblins. The poem’s metrical form invites comment and analysis: its rhythm is irregular and songlike, as with so many of Christina Rossetti’s poems, though they are usually more regular in their use of metre and rhythm, and their rhyme schemes tend to be slightly more ordered. The art critic John Ruskin (who coined the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’) said that in ‘Goblin Market’ Rossetti was ‘violating the common ear for metre’.

Gobelin scheme