Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"

Title page of First Edition of "Goblin Market"

When the Laura and her sister Lizzie leave their homestead to go "with pitchers to the reedy brook," Lizzie starts to hear the "fruit-call" of the goblin men whose temptation Laura had earlier been unable to resist, having gorged herself on many delicious fruits.

Till Lizzie urged, "O Laura, come;
I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look:
You should not loiter longer at this brook:
Come with me home ("Goblin Market, Lines 242-245)

A participant at our discussion on Monday the 19th observed that Laura and Lizzie had altogether different interactions with the goblin men.  Laura gave in to their "fruit-call," Lizzie stood firm while the men tried to force feed her. Laura pays for the fruit with a lock of her golden hair. Lizzie pays in coin, which the goblin me toss back at her when she rebuffs them.  Laura is a pleasure seeker, Lizzie a pleasure refuser.

When Lizzie returned to the ailing Laura, they shared the juices. Laura experiences some kind of "meltdown":

Her lips began to scortch,
That juice was wormwood to her tongue,
She loathed the feast;
Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast,
Her locks streamed 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 ...

She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?  (Lines 493-523)

Laura is now freed from her past experiences. Her meltdown led to a catharsis.

The first line of the next stanza reads: "Life out of death."  Laura is restored to health. Lizzie's heed of the "fruit-call" of the goblin men turns out to be act of self-sacrifice, which becomes for Rossetti a shining example of sisterly love.

Christina Rossetti is said to have maintained that the poem is not a "systematic allegory." I do not, however, consider it to be either nonsense verse or a 19th-century fairy tale.  "Goblin Market" says something profound about the transactions that take place between males and females as they look for the perceived pleasures of life.