It’s very easy to underestimate Christina Rossetti. When I first began reading her poems I felt her language and imagery lacked the delicacy and beauty of many other poets’ works from the same time period. Some of these poems seemed to revel a little too much in sing-song rhyme that gave it almost an immature childish feel.  Overall, my initial reaction to the first twenty poems or so was that she possessed talent and had written some good poems, but she lacked some quality to ascend her work to the level of Wordsworth at his best or Keats. Then I kept reading and slowly found myself enchanted with her poems. My estimation of her talent rose with each passing poem.

Her imagery at times took on a dark, bleak, and pessimistic edge. Her beautiful images describing nature showed that often what we believe beautiful is merely an illusion. The thrust behind most of her poems is the Biblical verse, “Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Since we must die then all our efforts, our desires, our hopes, and fears are merely foolish, pointless, all wastes of time. Any hope we have will end when we die. Any fears we have will end when we die. Any money we accrued will be useless to us when we die. However, despite often taking a pessimistic approach to life in her poems, Rossetti also thinks about the importance of love and other relationships to give some joy on this earth. Eventually Rossetti takes this idea of our ultimate death and pointlessness of existence to its theological conclusion; therefore, all our hopes and purposes in life should be fulfilled in the afterlife through redemption in Jesus. Even though a pessimistic poet, Rossetti is a thoroughly Christian poet. She writes devotional poetry.

Her strongest and most famous poem is “Goblin Market.” This is longer than most of her other work (15 pages when the rest of her poetry often is no more than 10 – 14 lines). In the poem, Laura and Lizzie, two sisters, meet up with monstrous goblins merchants selling all sorts of delicious fruits. Laura is tempted that she sneaks out one night and gorges upon the various wares of the goblins. The next day she can’t stop thinking of the fruit and hopes to get more from the goblins, but it turns out she can no longer hear or see them, even though, Lizzie and anyone who hasn’t tasted the fruit still can. Unable to get anymore of the fruit, Laura loses her will to live and slowly starts to die. Lizzie out of love for her sister journeys to meet the goblins who greet her kindly thinking they have another sucker whose soul they can steal, but Lizzie tries to buy the precious fruit with coins for the sake of her sister. The enraged goblins try to force fruit down her throat, but she struggles and eventually escapes. Laura drinks the juices from the attack off her sister’s clothes and is restored to health. Sisterly love saves the day and they grow old to narrate this strange little fairy tale poem to their own children.

The main theme is cautionary tale against temptation: be careful what you desire as it might cost your soul, which is very much in line with Rossetti’s other poems warning against the vanities of this world that can cost people access to heaven. If you need something so much it will be that much more painful when you lose it. The imagery in this poem is clearly sexual. Laura has her first sexual-like experience by eating the fruit of these goblins (and it’s no coincidence that fruit is often symbolically sexual in mythical stories). And she fades away when she can no longer gain access to those experiences. When the goblins try to force the fruit down Lizzie’s mouth this is symbolically an attempted rape.  Rossetti ends with a feminist theme about love between sisters trumping the “sexual” temptations of the world and one sister saving the other from destruction.

Advertisement