Goblin Market

Desire and Its Redemption

Rossetti’s most famous poem, “Goblin Market,” is a sustained allegory of temptation, fall, and redemption rendered in the language of sensory desire — of fruit, of taste, of the longing that consuming one thing intensifies rather than satisfies. Laura tastes the goblin fruit and is destroyed by her craving for more; Lizzie refuses the fruit, takes the goblins’ violence upon herself, and returns to her sister with the cure on her own body: “Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me.”

The eucharistic resonance is unmistakable and almost certainly deliberate. The poem is an allegory of the Incarnation and the Atonement, rendered in the mode of fairy tale: the one who will not consume becomes the one who is consumed for the sake of another. This is the gospel in the language of appetite and satisfaction, and Rossetti renders it with an imaginative precision that few explicitly theological poets have matched.

What the Devotional Poetry Reveals

Rossetti’s shorter devotional poems — “Up-Hill,” “Remember,” “A Better Resurrection” — are characterized by a formal austerity and an emotional directness that make them unlike almost anything else in Victorian poetry. They do not perform faith; they enact it. They address the realities of death, loss, and hope with a precision that sentimentality consistently evades.

“Up-Hill” is perhaps the most formally perfect of them: a dialogue between a traveler and an interlocutor about the road to death, conducted in a tone of such matter-of-fact acceptance that the reader barely notices how radical the acceptance is. The road winds up-hill all the way; the journey takes the whole day; there will be a rest at the end. This is the Christian account of mortal existence, rendered in eight lines that could not be improved.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose cost the seed of the woman bears in her own body. Rossetti understood this with the intimacy of a poet who had refused two marriages for reasons of conscience and lived the consequences of those refusals in chronic illness and relative obscurity. Her devotional poetry is not the poetry of a person for whom faith is easy; it is the poetry of a person for whom faith is the only alternative to despair, and who has chosen it with full knowledge of what the choice costs.

Her work is a form of testimony in the most direct sense: she testifies, in specific images and specific formal structures, to the reality of a God who is worth the cost of following. The road winds up-hill all the way. And there is a rest at the end. Rossetti believed both halves of that sentence, and her poetry makes both halves visible.

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