Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’ and Spenser's Malbecco

Abstract

IN Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’, on one night Laura and Lizzie hear the goblins calling, but on the next night—now that Laura has sucked the goblins’ fruit—only Lizzie hears their call: Laura turned cold as stone To find her sister heard that cry alone, That goblin cry, ‘Come buy our fruits, come buy’. Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit? Must she no more such succous pasture find, Gone deaf and blind? (ll. 253–9) It is true that criticism has done little to suggest Spenser's importance to Rossetti's poetry, perhaps because his direct importance to nineteenth-century culture generally is often understated. Yet she is one poet who might make us question the view that ‘The generation of Keats, Byron and Shelley was the last in which Spenser was a presence for contemporary poets’.2 Indeed, the very opening of ‘Goblin Market’ proclaims his presence: the literary model for the goblins’ enticing catalogue of fruits (ll. 3–31) is the catalogue of trees in the first canto of Book I of The Faerie Queene. The goblins end by describing their fruits as ‘Sweet to tongue and sound to eye’ (l. 30); the catalogue of the trees of the Wandering Wood ends with ‘the Maple seeldom inward sound’ (I. i. 9)—a tree that may be sound to eye only.3 These descriptions warn the watchful reader that the delights of the world may not be what they seem. The Red Cross Knight and Una—‘with pleasure forward led’ (I. i. 8)—will be led into danger, for the monster Error lies within the wood of wandering. And Laura will learn that what is sweet to tongue may be sweet only to tongue: ‘like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood’ (ll. 554–5). Not only must we understand Spenser's importance to Rossetti, but we must learn to read her poetry as closely as we would read his.4