'Transfigured to His Likeness': Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'

Abstract

Announcing their primacy, Christina Rossetti's fairy tales anchor her first two collections of poetry. 'Goblin Market' and 'The Prince's Progress' begin and title the volumes of 1862 and 1866, and 'Maiden-Song' follows directly on 'The Prince's Progress' in 1866; these three poems inaugurate, in their original order, the 1875 and 1890 'new and enlarged' editions of her poems. Their positioning at the beginnings of sequences that conclude with 'Devotional Pieces' suggests that these texts, for all their priority, belong to the more secularized band of Rossetti's poetic spectrum. Indeed, in her concordance The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti, Nilda Jiménez finds no scriptural echoes in any of these poems, an absence truly remarkable given the ubiquity of scriptural resonance in Rossetti's work. Her brother William Michael speculated that removal of Biblical references and diction from Christina Rossetti's poems would reduce her pages 'to something approaching a vacuum': 'the Bible was so much her rule of life and faith that it had almost become a part of herself, and she uttered herself accordingly' (Preface, Golden Treasury Poems, xii). Despite the appearance of a biblical vacuum in her fairy tales, however, they do in truth call up Scripture and speak Rossetti's Christian devotion through and through, but in ways, it may be, inapparent to our usual apprehensions of religious utterance. The alleged 'godlessness' of 'Goblin Market' in particular recommends that fairy tale to Germaine Greer, who otherwise dismisses much of Rossetti's verse as pious nonsense (x, vii, xxii); but even Jerome McGann, who contra Greer sensitively confirms the Christian 'machinery' of the poem, locates its metaphorical operations on 'secular grounds' (237–8, 247, 251).