Christina Rossetti

Goblin Market

• 1862
• emerging from a world in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning has tried to kick down the door of great verse
• a response to the response to the most ambitious poem by a woman in Elizabeth Barrett Browning#Aurora Leigh
• what is gained is lack - the thirst for more, this hunger
• Lizzie's self-sacrifice which slakes it and redeems her
• fabulously sensual
• is it an allegory and if so of what?
  • You can go to town because the scale is small and the symbolic resonances go out
• invested in C19 religious issues but dealing in sensuality and small things
  • rebirth at 522
• the object-ness of this world and of bodies (125-8):

"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red.

• "sugar-baited words" (234)
• 478-484:

"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine doing,
And ruined in my ruin,
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"