Reading ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti

Part four

Welcome to part four of our read-a-long of ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti, which it turns out is even wilder and stranger than I’d remembered. An episode recap for those who need one: Laura bought some goblin fruit with a lock of her hair, then gorged on it. Now she is addicted and desperately craves more, but – in a cruel twist of fate – can no longer hear the cries of the goblin market (whilst her sister Lizzie, who did not taste the fruit, can). Let’s join them again…

Day after day, night after night,

Laura kept watch in vain

In sullen silence of exceeding pain.

She never caught again the goblin cry:

“Come buy, come buy;”—

She never spied the goblin men

Hawking their fruits along the glen:

But when the noon wax’d bright

Her hair grew thin and grey;

She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn

To swift decay and burn

Her fire away.

I’m struck by ‘the sullen silence of exceeding pain’ here – it seems able to carry two truths at once: that Laura is being wilful and bad-tempered, but also that her agony is real. The last image is a beautiful way to show the passage of time too, isn’t it? A month passes, the moon waxing then waning, and Laura wanes with it – her light shrinking. The fire and ‘wax’ also make me think of a candle burning at both ends (as Edna St. Vincent Millay might have it). As an added note, the verb ‘to wax’ is everywhere in this poem once you’ve noticed it.

One day remembering her kernel-stone

She set it by a wall that faced the south;

Dew’d it with tears, hoped for a root,

Watch’d for a waxing shoot,

But there came none;

It never saw the sun,

It never felt the trickling moisture run:

While with sunk eyes and faded mouth

She dream’d of melons, as a traveller sees

False waves in desert drouth

With shade of leaf-crown’d trees,

And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.

The kernel-stone is interesting here. Why does the stone not grow? It is by a south-facing wall, so why does it never witness the sun? It seems to be somehow dead – unable to see or feel. Whilst the stones and seeds of real fruit are full of life and potential, perhaps the pit of a goblin fruit is always barren. It’s a reminder that the fruit is artificial, like an opium dream. And it is followed by another image of aridity – Laura’s fantasies of melons(!!!) occur like a mirage in a desert with its ‘sandful breeze’ (is sandful a neologism? It’s a wonderful one), making her thirst intensify.

She no more swept the house,

Tended the fowls or cows,

Fetch’d honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,

Brought water from the brook:

But sat down listless in the chimney-nook

And would not eat.

Tender Lizzie could not bear

To watch her sister’s cankerous care

Yet not to share.

She night and morning

Caught the goblins’ cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy;”—

Beside the brook, along the glen,

She heard the tramp of goblin men,

The yoke and stir

Poor Laura could not hear;

Long’d to buy fruit to comfort her,

But fear’d to pay too dear.

She thought of Jeanie in her grave,

Who should have been a bride;

But who for joys brides hope to have

Fell sick and died

In her gay prime,

In earliest winter time

With the first glazing rime,

With the first snow-fall of crisp winter time.

This middle section is the calm before the climax, so is retreads previous material a little. But such repetition also has a power – it acts like the refrain might in a ballad. I like repetition in poems: its culminative effect. And patterns can illuminate what is the same but different. We are reminded of the pattern of the girls’ routine, but now it is ‘no more’. We are reminded of the goblin parade and their market-cries, but this time Laura cannot hear. We are reminded of the story of Jeanie, but this time with added detail that darkens the picture. For Jeanie ‘should have been a bride’ but ‘for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died’ (the goblin fruit here then is explicitly a metaphor for sexual experience).

Those last four lines are amazing, the rhymes of prime/time/rime/time piling up like layers of snow over Jeanie’s dead body…

Till Laura dwindling

Seem’d knocking at Death’s door:

Then Lizzie weigh’d no more

Better and worse;

But put a silver penny in her purse,

Kiss’d Laura, cross’d the heath with clumps of furze

At twilight, halted by the brook:

And for the first time in her life

Began to listen and look.

Does Lizzie weigh no more than Laura? Are they both dwindling – that is, so joined that if one dies they both die? Or does the line ‘Lizzie weigh’d no more / Better or worse’ mean that she’s weighing up what to do, and can’t decide whether giving Laura the fruit to keep her alive is the right thing or not? I wonder, in terms of the Christian imagery, whether the silver penny has a significance. Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Lizzie is making a hard decision here. It is one many of us have had to make.

If we buy an alcoholic a drink are we betraying them on some level? Or only trying to temporarily ease the pain of someone we love?

‘And for the first time in her life / Began to listen and look’ is a surprising line too, and deserves some attention. It reminds us that Lizzie isn’t a simple heroine. Although she’s the ‘good’ girl, she has run away from things before in the poem: from life, from experience, from temptation. She has covered her ears. Now she is beginning to listen, which is dangerous, but also feels like an act of incredible bravery.

Laugh’d every goblin

When they spied her peeping:

Came towards her hobbling,

Flying, running, leaping,

Puffing and blowing,

Chuckling, clapping, crowing,

Clucking and gobbling,

Mopping and mowing,

Full of airs and graces,

Pulling wry faces,

Demure grimaces,

Cat-like and rat-like,

Ratel- and wombat-like,

Snail-paced in a hurry,

Parrot-voiced and whistler,

Helter skelter, hurry skurry,

Chattering like magpies,

Fluttering like pigeons,

Gliding like fishes,—

Hugg’d her and kiss’d her:

Squeez’d and caress’d her:

Stretch’d up their dishes,

Panniers, and plates:

“Look at our apples

Russet and dun,

Bob at our cherries,

Bite at our peaches,

Citrons and dates,

Grapes for the asking,

Pears red with basking

Out in the sun,

Plums on their twigs;

Pluck them and suck them,

Pomegranates, figs.”—

Here they come again! Once more, this section contains a lot of repetition or refrain. We’ve seen a lot of this business before, and heard these descriptions of the goblins, these adverts for fruit. But at the same time it’s an absolute barrage of doing. How many different verbs can you count?

Peeping, hobbling, flying, running, leaping, puffing, blowing, chuckling, clapping, crowing, clucking, gobbling, mopping, mowing… this is an accelerated chaos of movement that makes me instinctively brace, blink and wince, the goblins ‘Fluttering like pigeons’ near my face.

Christina Rossetti is so good at verbs - this poem is an absolute masterclass on how much work can be done by verbs alone. How suggestive they can be. Everything happens far too quickly for her to fanny around with adverbs.

The brisk rhyming couplets come thick and fast too, with an inevitability that tells us Lizzie is losing control of this situation.

“Good folk,” said Lizzie,

Mindful of Jeanie:

“Give me much and many: —

Held out her apron,

Toss’d them her penny.

“Nay, take a seat with us,

Honour and eat with us,”

They answer’d grinning:

“Our feast is but beginning.

Night yet is early,

Warm and dew-pearly,

Wakeful and starry:

Such fruits as these

No man can carry:

Half their bloom would fly,

Half their dew would dry,

Half their flavour would pass by.

Sit down and feast with us,

Be welcome guest with us,

Cheer you and rest with us.”—

Shit. Now Lizzie is in trouble. They will not sell her what she wants to buy, and they are making up new rules. It’s like when you get in a cab and then realise the driver is not taking you where you’ve asked him to go. That sense of rapidly losing mastery; of things spiralling.

Suddenly, as readers, we are keenly aware this is a group of male goblins, and they do not want her to leave. Lizzie is, in many ways, the fruit they are describing that ‘no man can carry’ - blooming, moist, flavoursome – and that they wish to feast upon. The next verse needs a trigger-warning, as those who still think this is a children’s poem might be shocked to read what is as close as Victorian literature gets to a description of gang-rape.

“Thank you,” said Lizzie: “But one waits

At home alone for me:

So without further parleying,

If you will not sell me any

Of your fruits though much and many,

Give me back my silver penny

I toss’d you for a fee.”—

They began to scratch their pates,

No longer wagging, purring,

But visibly demurring,

Grunting and snarling.

One call’d her proud,

Cross-grain’d, uncivil;

Their tones wax’d loud,

Their looks were evil.

Lashing their tails

They trod and hustled her,

Elbow’d and jostled her,

Claw’d with their nails,

Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,

Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,

Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,

Stamp’d upon her tender feet,

Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits

Against her mouth to make her eat.

They turn on her here then. Who doesn’t recognise such testosterone-fuelled tempers; the men whose rage can explode out of nowhere?  ‘Twitch’d her hair out by the roots’ is perhaps the most unpleasant line for me, in its torturous closeup, but the torn gowns and soiled stockings are a clear indication, I think, that we should read the passage as sexual assault. The forced oral penetration is also grotesque (and makes me think of the force-feeding of the suffragettes, although this came later), particularly in that realistic detail of her hands being held down as they do it. The scene is brutal, bestial, squalid. But Lizzie will not be broken. Let’s read the astonishing last two verses of this segment:

White and golden Lizzie stood,

Like a lily in a flood,—

Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone

Lash’d by tides obstreperously,—

Like a beacon left alone

In a hoary roaring sea,

Sending up a golden fire,—

Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree

White with blossoms honey-sweet

Sore beset by wasp and bee,—

Like a royal virgin town

Topp’d with gilded dome and spire

Close beleaguer’d by a fleet

Mad to tug her standard down.

What a verse! The imagery is incredible. Mythical; biblical. Lizzie is an angel, she is the lily of the field, she is a lighthouse guiding us to safety, she is a besieged city (she is also, remarkably, like ‘a rock of blue-vein’d stone’ – another disorientatingly phallic image). The forces around her are ‘hoary’ (meaning ancient or grey, but the word ‘whore’ hangs in the ear); they lash and tug. She is, most importantly, a ‘virgin’, beset by those who would have her fallen. But there is also a delicious confusion of connotations – she delicate yet solid; fruiting yet blossoming; honey-sweet yet ‘sore beset’ by bees. The dome is both temple and hive. She is floods yet is on fire.

One may lead a horse to water,

Twenty cannot make him drink.

Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her,

Coax’d and fought her,

Bullied and besought her,

Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink,

Kick’d and knock’d her,

Maul’d and mock’d her,

Lizzie utter’d not a word;

Would not open lip from lip

Lest they should cram a mouthful in:

But laugh’d in heart to feel the drip

Of juice that syrupp’d all her face,

And lodg’d in dimples of her chin,

And streak’d her neck which quaked like curd.

At last the evil people,

Worn out by her resistance,

Flung back her penny, kick’d their fruit

Along whichever road they took,

Not leaving root or stone or shoot;

Some writh’d into the ground,

Some div’d into the brook

With ring and ripple,

Some scudded on the gale without a sound,

Some vanish’d in the distance.

This scene, for many readers, is the most memorable. Here is Arthur Rackham’s representation of it:

For those with a stronger stomach, I’d recommend the picture of Lizzie with the goblins that Kinuko Y. Craft drew for Playboy (google it)

It’s another verse of incredible violence and abuse – one thinks of the ‘fallen’ women Christina Rossetti must have encountered at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate. How many of them had partners or pimps who pinched them ‘black as ink’, or ‘Maul’d and mock’d’ them? The goblins try to smear Lizzie both figuratively and literally.

Critics have claimed that Lizzie is Christlike in this scene too, with it a kind of crucifixion that Lizzie endures stoically and silently, sacrificing herself for her sister. But for me the scene is too degrading to sustain this reading; too grossly sexual. The details of syrup lodged in her dimples; the neck like ‘curd’. The goblins’ aim is not to kill Lizzie but to utterly humiliate and ruin her. Yet – hang on, did you notice? – she ‘laugh’d in heart to feel the drip’.

That verb ‘laugh’d’ is our first and only clue that rather than turning the other cheek like Christ, Lizzie has a cunning plan. She is her own honeytrap. Has she been manipulating the goblins the whole time into giving her what she wants?

And then they disappear, in a chilling few lines, like demons in a horror-movie – writhing into the ground like worms; scudding on the ‘gale’; disappearing into thin air. It’s utterly nightmarish.

We will find out next time if Lizzie’s audacious plan has worked.