Poem: Goblin Market

Introduction

Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is a richly woven narrative poem first published in 1862 that follows two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as they encounter the tempting goblin merchants who sell forbidden, enchanted fruit. The poem moves between bright, sensuous description and darker moral urgency, creating a fairy-tale atmosphere that conceals sharper questions about desire, sacrifice, and sisterhood.

Plot Overview

The poem opens as Laura and Lizzie, young and innocent, hear the goblin cries and are drawn to the market where goblin men call out their exotic fruits. Laura succumbs to temptation, trades a lock of her hair for the fruit, and becomes obsessed, wasting away from an unspoken craving after her first taste. Lizzie resists the goblins' advances and, to save Laura, goes into the market to confront them.

Climax and Rescue

Lizzie's rescue is visceral and courageous: she allows the goblins to smear their juices on her face and body without consuming them, enduring their coercion so she can return to Laura with the tainted offering as an antidote. Laura eats the untainted fruit that Lizzie brings and is restored, while Lizzie bears the physical and spiritual marks of her ordeal. The goblins vanish, and the sisters' bond is deepened by the ordeal.

Characters

Laura embodies impulsive desire and the consequences of giving in to temptation, while Lizzie represents steadfast love, self-sacrifice, and resistance. The goblins function as ambiguous antagonists: alluring and monstrous, they are simultaneously peddlers of pleasure and purveyors of ruin. Secondary figures, parents who never fully understand the danger, highlight the isolation of the sisters' experience.

Themes

Central themes include temptation and redemption, the interplay of desire and danger, and the power of love and solidarity as a redeeming force. The poem explores the cost of indulgence and the ways personal sacrifice can restore another, while suggesting that communal and familial bonds provide moral and emotional salvation. Questions of agency, commerce, and the body recur, with desire depicted as both life-affirming and potentially destructive.

Imagery and Symbolism

Rossetti's language brims with sensory detail: the goblins' cries, the lush, often erotic descriptions of fruit, and the vivid contrasts between light and shadow. Fruit operates as a loaded symbol, simultaneously representing sensual pleasure, forbidden knowledge, and the commodities of a marketplace that exploits need. The sisters' physical transactions, the trading of hair, the smeared juices, act as symbolic exchanges that complicate simple moral readings.

Style and Tone

The poem blends nursery-rhyme cadence with medieval and Romantic echoes, shifting from playful invocations to intense, almost biblical intensity. Repetition, refrains, and brisk conversational stanzas create momentum, while occasional darker cadences and stark imagery underscore moments of crisis. Rossetti's diction invites multiple interpretive frames, from Christian allegory to feminist or economic readings.

Legacy and Interpretation

"Goblin Market" has inspired a wide array of critical interpretations, including readings that emphasize sexual politics, economic critique, religious allegory, and feminist solidarity. Its narrative of temptation and sacrificial rescue continues to resonate, offering both a haunting fairy tale and a layered meditation on how desire, commerce, and love shape human fate. The poem remains one of Rossetti's most celebrated and debated works, admired for its lyric intensity and moral complexity.