GOBLIN MARKET BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI – A REVIEW BY AHMED MAIWADA

Goblin Market is a long narrative poem about Laura and Lizzie, living alone. Morning and evening, they hear the voices of goblins saying, “Come buy our orchard fruits”; fruits that include “wild free-born berries, crab-apples, blackberries, apricots, strawberries…” Every evening, Laura, at the “brookside rushes”, bow her head and hear, while Lizzie veiled her blushes. Lizzie will tell Laura: “lie close… /We must not look at goblin men/We must not buy their fruits:/Who knows upon what soil they fed/Their hungry thirsty roots?” Lizzie also tells Laura: “You must not peep at goblin men.” But, as Lizzie covers her eyes, so close lest they should look, Laura raises her glossy head and whispers, like a restless brook, “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,/Down the glen tramp little men./One hauls a basket,/One bears a plate,/One lugs a golden dish/Of many pounds weight.” Laura imagines the fairness of the vine on which the fruits grow. Lizzie warns Laura, “Their offers should not charm us,/Their evil gifts would harm us.” And Lizzie blocks her ears with her fingers, shut her eyes and ran. But Laura lingers, wondering at each of those merchant goblin men. Through her eyes, we know more about them: “One had a cat’s face,/One whisk’d a tail,/One tramp’d at a rat’s pace,/One crawl’d like a snail,/One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry,/One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.” Six goblins! But Laura thinks they “sounded kind and full of loves/In the pleasant weather”.

Rossetti’s gift of imagery resonates while describing Laura’s neck, as follows:

“Laura stretch’d her gleaming neck                                    

“Like a rush-imbedded swan,

“Like a lily from the beck,

“Like a moonlit poplar branch,

“Like a weasel at launch

“When its last restraint is gone.”

The goblins arrive at Laura’s hiding place, crying, “Come buy, come buy.” They stop and begin leering and signalling as “Laura stares, but doesn’t stir”. The whisk’d tailed goblin asks her to taste, “In tones as smooth as honey”. The others join, purring, speaking welcome and whistling like a bird. Laura tells them she has no copper coin in her purse and no silver neither. They tell her to pay with her “golden” hair. She pulls a “precious golden lock” and adds “a tear more rare than pearl”. The goblins allow her to suck their “fruit globes fair and red:/Sweeter than honey from the rock,/Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,/Clearer than water flow’d that juice;/She never tasted such before”. When she walks home, she “knew not was it night or day.”

Back home, Lizzie warns Laura of lingering so late as: “Twilight is not good for maidens/Should not loiter in the glen/In haunt of goblin men.” She reminds Laura of Jeanie, who ate of the goblins’ fruits and was left pining in the “noonlight” seeking them by night and day but not finding them, as a result of which she: “dwindled and grew grey;/Then fell with the first snow.” Alas, Laura reveals to Lizzie that she has also eaten of the goblins’ fruits and that tomorrow she will buy more. In the morning, while Laura and Lizzie do their chores, Lizzie does to “with an open heart”, while Laura was “in an absent dream… longing for the night.” She and Lizzie go to fetch water at the brook in the evening and Lizzie fetches and is ready to leave for home, while Laura lingers at the brook, insisting that it wasn’t late yet to start going home. She never hears “Come buy, come buy”, but turns cold to observe that her sister alone can hear the goblins’ cry. From that evening, Laura will watch day-by-day, but never hearing: “Come buy, come buy.” Soon, “She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn/To swift decay and burn/Her fire away.” When she remembers her “kernel-stone” and sows it by the wall and waters it with her tears, and watches “for a waxing shoot”, no fruit grows from it for her to eat; and she is left dreaming of melons “as a traveller sees/False waves in desert drouth/With shade of leaf-crown’dtree,/And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.”

In the end, compassionate Lizzie, who cannot bear her sister’s “knocking at Death’s door!” sacrifices herself and dares the goblin. With a silver penny in her purse she kisses Laura and walks across the heath, at twilight to meet them. For the first time in her life she begins “to listen and look”. And when they spy Lizzie, the goblins come “Flying, running, leaping,/Puffing and blowing,/ Chuckling, clapping, crowing,/Clucking and gobbling,/Mopping and mowing. And they offer her their fruits. Lizzie, still mindful of Jeanie, asks for “much and many” and, holding out her apron, tosses her penny. The goblins insist that she honours them by eating with them. When Lizzie refuses, the “call’d her proud,/Cross-grain’d, uncivil;/Their tomes wax’d loud,/Their looks were evil. Lizzie gets lashed with their tails and trodden and hustled and elbowed and jostled and clawed with their nails. They tear her gown and soil her stocking, twitch her hair out by the roots, stamp upon her tender feet, hold her hands and squeeze their fruits against her mouth to make her eat. Still Lizzie, “White and golden” stands, “Like a lilly in a flood, -/Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone/Lash’d by tides obstreperously, -/Like a beacon left alone/In a hoary roaring sea,/Sending up a golden fire, -/Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree/White with blossoms honey-sweet/Sore beset by wasp and bee, -/Like a royal virgin town/Topp’d with gilded dome and spire/Close beleaguer’d by a fleet/Mad to tug her standards down.” Lizzie returns home with her body covered by the goblins’ fruit juice, which prove to be the antidote to the deadly addiction that is sending her sister to early grave, for Laura “…kiss’d and kiss’d her with a hungry mouth./Her lips began to scorch./That joice was wormwood to her tongue,/She loath’d the feast:/Writhing as one possess’d she leap’d and sung,/Rent her robe, and wrung/Her hands in lamentable haste,/And beat her breast. And, once again, Rossetti will wax lyrical in the following lines:

“Her locks stream’d like the torch

“Borne by a racer at full speed,

“Or like the mane of horses in their flight,

“Or like an eagle when she stems the light

“Straight toward the sun,

“Or like a caged thing freed,

“Or like a flying flag when armies run.

I am aware that many a critic had read sexual meanings into this poem, thereby drawing the conclusion that it is not a poem for children. In my opinion – and this despite several readings of Goblin Market, the poem is written, as every great poem should be written, with several suggestions left for the reader to find himself inside it. Therefore, a reader with a dirty mind cannot escape finding the poem riddled with sexual meanings. However, I could only see a morally balanced poem here, full of lessons, especially for young and growing girls, that “fruits like honey to the throat”, could turn out to be “poison to the blood”. Young ones should therefore read this poem and, while learning from the great poem-writing artistry of Rossetti: her ordered, rhythmic lines that exhibit changing but enticing rhyme patterns, as they also learn to stay away from things that glitter. Again, the motherly love of Lizzie for Laura is almost Christ-like, and one wonder if, woman to woman, a love like this could ever be experienced, especially within the context of the feminist ideology currently making waves.