Laura chooses to stay and watch the goblins. Lizzie then puts her fingers in her ears to block the sound of the goblins’ cries and runs away, leaving Laura on her own. Still, Lizzie is steadfast in her refusal to look and warns Laura once again that the goblin men mean to harm them. Laura describes the goblin men’s odd movements and wonders where the luscious and unusual fruit they’re selling might have grown. Lizzie warns Laura not to look and covers her own eyes for protection, but the incurably curious Laura looks directly at the goblins. They grow fearful and crouch down to hide themselves. In her best work, you can tell you’re reading a Christina Rossetti poem.Each morning and evening young women hear the cry of the goblin men, who seductively describe the fruits they’re selling and urge the young women to “come buy.” One evening, sisters Laura and Lizzie hear the goblins’ call while visiting a brook to draw water. She took her influences from everyone from the King James Bible to the Metaphysical Poets to the Romantics, but there is something distinctive about her poetry. She was remarkably prolific: her Complete Poems (Penguin Classics) runs to well over 1,000 pages and is a treasure-trove for the poetry-lover.
Rossetti’s influences were as diverse as the many poetic forms in which she wrote: sonnets, ballads, narrative poems, lyrics, even Christmas carols (‘ In the Bleak Midwinter’ to name but the most famous). Goblin Market and Other Poems also reveals what a remarkably precocious poet Rossetti was: several of the poems in the volume, such as ‘ Remember’ and ‘ When I am dead, my dearest’, were composed before she had turned twenty. The title poem is a long narrative work which is often taken for a children’s poem because of its fairy-tale motifs and imagery Rossetti, however, always denied that the poem was intended for children. Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published rather than printed, and it was the book that brought her to public attention.
Christina Rossetti had in fact had a volume of her poems (titled simply Verses) privately printed in 1847, though it attracted little attention. It ran simply: ‘Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator.’ It’s often claimed that Rossetti’s first volume of poems was Goblin Market and Other Poems, which appeared in 1862 when Rossetti was in her early thirties this is only partly true. Christina Rossetti composed her first poem while still a very young girl she dictated it to her mother.
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