Rossetti's Poems Research Articles

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

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).

Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

The language of Christina Rossetti's best-known poem, Goblin Market, is remarkably mercantile. Come come buy, the iterated cry of the merchant men that punctuates the poem, has few parallels in English poetry in the nineteenth century. While buying and selling, markets and merchants and their customers, are a staple of nursery rhymes-To market, to market, jiggety jigmost literary Victorian poetry, like the little pig, resolutely stays home from commercial encounters. Goblin Market not only adopts the forms of the nursery rhyme but also carries the mercantile preoccupations of Mother Goose into a volume of serious poetry.' Much of the criticism of Goblin Market treats its story of buying and selling, like its rhymes and goblins, as the figurative dress for a narrative of spiritual temptation, fall, and redemption.2 But what happens if instead we read the figure as the subject: buying and selling, or more specifically, the relation of women to those markets of the nursery tales? Rossetti's merchants are goblin men; their customers are maidens. When Lizzie and Laura step from home into the male marketplace of Rossetti's poem, they cross a fictive but strongly invested boundary separating not only serious poetry from nursery rhymes but also moral from economic space, private from public, natural creativity from the alienated labor of capitalist production, andunderwriting and sustaining these distinctions-female from male.3 Victorian culture acknowledges only one figure who transgresses this boundary-the prostitute. The threat she inevitably poses to the security of these distinctions is contained when she is cast out from the company of moral women. Rossetti's poem is haunted by that shadowy figure. As in so many Victorian narratives of the fallen woman, Laura purchases pleasure only to discover that her own body is ultimately consumed. But Laura is not a prostitute; she is never excluded from the company of moral women by Lizzie or by her author. Rossetti avoids what might be thought the bolder move: she does not take the prostitute as a defining instance of all

The Language of Exclusion: The Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti.

Preface Illustrations Part I. Living in the World Overview Parallel Sketches Part II. Lives Emily Dickinson Christina Rossetti Part III. The Victorian World War Poems The Market is for Bankers, Burglars and Goblins Woman's Place/Woman's Nature Part IV. Conclusion Women Poets, Literary Influence and the Canon Notes Selected Bibliography Index to Dickinson's Poems Cited in Text Index to Rossetti's Poems Cited in Text Index

Rossetti's Poems in Italian

Rossetti's Poems in Italian

Rossetti's poem on the Boer War, 1881

Rossetti's poem on the Boer War, 1881