The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Christina Rossetti · a book of poems, the author’s first trade volume · Macmillan, London and Cambridge, 1862 · scored as the book as published, the title poem, the lyrics and ballads and the closing Devotional Pieces, with the two designs by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as context and not as the work; on Rossetti’s English, read from knowledge, and quoted only where the words are certain
Mode
The fairy-tale narrative and the lyric of reserve: catalogue, incantation and question and answer, in a voice that withholds as often as it sings
Mythos
The forbidden fruit of a world under the hill; the girl who ate before and died; the Fall by eating and the cure by eating from a body offered; the sister’s descent and return; the pilgrim’s road and its inn; the convent, the dead bride, the grave
Phase
From the goblins’ cry at morning and evening, through lyrics of love, loss and death, to the closing devotional pieces
Presentation
One long narrative poem in short irregular rhymed lines of mostly two to four stresses; then lyrics and ballads, among them Petrarchan sonnets (“Remember”, “After Death”), the four question-and-answer quatrains of “Up-Hill” and the two eight-line stanzas of “A Birthday” and “Song”; hymn measures in the devotional section
Register
Plain diction, rich rhyme, repetition as incantation; between the riot of the market and the stillness of the grave
Scale
Two sisters in a cottage with cows and bees and a brook; a market in a glen; a lover dead or departing; the soul on its road; the grave and what may lie beyond it
Governing Proposition
A first book of lyrics, ballads and devotional pieces, headed by one long narrative poem in which a girl eats the fruit of goblin merchants, pays for it with her body, wastes, and is saved by her sister, who goes down among the goblins, will not eat, and carries the remedy home on her own body. The wager of the book is that renunciation can be sung: that a nursery measure can carry appetite, its price and a bodily sacrifice together without choosing between the sacred and the erotic, and that the short lyric of reserve, of love released from remembering and death imagined as rest, can say exactly what desire costs and where its satisfaction is deferred.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Christina Rossetti (1830 to 1894) published Goblin Market and Other Poems with Macmillan, in London and Cambridge, in 1862. It was her first trade volume, and it carried two designs by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a frontispiece and a title page, which are context here and not the work. The book opens with its title poem, by far the longest piece in it; the secular lyrics and ballads follow, and it closes on a section of “Devotional Pieces”. The later reprints, the edition of 1865 and the collected Poems of 1875, which merged this book with The Prince’s Progress of 1866, are not the object. The desk scores the book of 1862.
A book of lyrics and one long narrative poem is weighed at its own scale, and weighed most on the pieces that carry it: “Goblin Market”; “Up-Hill”; “Remember”; “Echo”; “A Birthday”; “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”); “After Death”; “Winter: My Secret”; “The Convent Threshold”; “In the Round Tower at Jhansi”; “Cousin Kate”; “An Apple-Gathering”; “From House to Home”; and among the devotional pieces “A Better Resurrection” and “Advent”. The title poem governs the axes on which it is strongest, The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Made. The rest of the book is charged where it costs, on The Inevitable, The Inner Law and The Encompassed.
The book’s first sound is the market’s call: “Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry”, a falling opening that sets the pulse of everything after it, and then the cry itself, “Come buy, come buy”. The lines are short and irregular, mostly of two to four stresses, rhymed without a fixed scheme, in couplets and triplets and rhymes held over many lines. It is a nursery rhythm, and it is used for an adult fable of appetite, price and rescue. The choice was the poem’s first and largest risk, and the poem stands at the head of a first book.
Movement II
The goblin men come crying their fruit, and the lists of it run on past need. The catalogues look like excess and are the temptation itself: the list is the market’s patter, and the reader is made to feel its rush before the poem judges it. The merchants are animal, one with a cat’s face, one tramping at a rat’s pace, and their voices come in a riot. The poem’s verdict depends on the reader’s complicity, and the form secures it. Set the same matter in blank verse or a regular stanza, and the appetite would become a description of appetite.
The goblins name the price: “Buy from us with a golden curl”. The woman pays with her body, and the thing bought wastes the buyer. “She sucked until her lips were sore”: eight monosyllables, and the indulgence is complete. Then comes the poem’s hardest truth. Having eaten, Laura can no longer hear the goblins’ cry, while her sister still can. Indulgence deafens the indulged to the very call she craves, and she wastes beside the one who hears what she cannot.
Behind her stands Jeanie, the girl who ate before and died of it. She is a few lines, and she carries the whole threat of what Laura will become: she is the precedent every myth needs, and the reason the poem cannot spare her. The sisters lie together at night, and the household goes on around them, the cows and the bees and the brook. The poem never thins its girls into figures. Its archetype stands in a cottage, and it is load-bearing because it stays particular.
Movement III
Lizzie goes down to the goblins for her sister’s sake, and will not eat. They smear the juice on her face, and she stands firm in the glen among them. It is the poem’s hot height, an ordeal endured, and her refusal is the saving act. The descent of the second sister into the place of danger is among the oldest of patterns, and here it is the poem’s structure, not its ornament.
She comes home with the juice on her body and offers it: “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you”, and then, “Eat me, drink me, love me”. The Fall and the Eucharist are both in the structure, and neither is an allusion. Laura fell by eating; she is saved by eating from a body offered for her. Whatever one names it, the pattern is built: a fall by eating, a sacrificial descent, a cure by eating from the offered body. The redemption has no man at its centre. A woman saves a woman bodily, the erotic is unhidden, and the shape is still claimed as Christian.
Laura’s recovery is a fever: fire runs through her veins, and she is likened to a watch-tower shaken down in an earthquake. It is the second of the poem’s great passages. The poem has since borne the Christian reading, the erotic and lesbian readings, the economic reading of the market and the woman’s price, readings of addiction and of anorexia, and the reading as the children’s book it was half made for. Each finds the poem able to hold it, and none has shut out the others. The poem will not settle between sacred and erotic, warning and celebration: that refusal is its yield, and it is also why its truth stays plural rather than stated.
Movement IV
The lyrics rise at a colder pitch. “Up-Hill” is sixteen lines in four quatrains of alternating question and answer: “Does the road wind up-hill all the way? / Yes, to the very end”. The questions are plain and the answers calm, and the form enacts the soul’s anxious enquiry and the reply that quiets it, so that the form is the faith. In sixteen lines the poem makes a whole life into a pilgrim’s road with an inn at its end.
“Remember” is a Petrarchan sonnet that holds its imperative through the octave and lets it go at the volta, exactly where the speaker turns from asking to be remembered to releasing the beloved: “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad”. “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”) is two stanzas of eight lines, and its last line is shortened so that it falls away as the speaker does: “Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget”. Love here would rather be forgotten than grieved, and death is imagined as rest and not as judgement.
“Echo” calls the dead lover back, “Come to me in the silence of the night”, in a voice that already knows he will not come. “Winter: My Secret” keeps its secret and says that it does. “A Birthday” is the other pitch, “My heart is like a singing bird”, an elevation of joy rarer in her than reserve. The diction throughout is plain, the rhyme rich without strain, the repetition incantatory. These lyrics refine inherited instruments, Petrarch’s sonnet, the hymn and the ballad, rather than break them; their swerve is small beside the title poem’s, and their command is complete.
Movement V
The book is uneven as a first book is. The ballads repeat one plot, the jilted or betrayed woman, run on stock causes and fall in places into stock diction; they do not rise. The devotional pieces restate one another, often in serviceable hymn measures, and a formula of weariness and longing, “I have no wit, no words, no tears” in “A Better Resurrection”, recurs until it reads as a manner. “In the Round Tower at Jhansi”, a newspaper incident of the Indian rising, sits outside the book’s law and is its weakest survivor. A volume without a third of its poems would know almost all it knows: that is the charge on The Inevitable, The Inner Law and The Encompassed.
One law nonetheless runs from the goblins’ riot to the bare devotional lyric. Desire is real, its present object deceives or withholds, and satisfaction is deferred to a love that costs the body, or to death and what lies beyond it. The title poem, which looks like the exception, is the fullest statement of that law, and its coda gives the thesis to the children it names: “For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather”. The volume was the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, ahead of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems (1870). Its lyrics have been anthologised and set to music since her lifetime. Its critical standing sank for some decades after the First World War; the text and its readers did not go.
On this desk it stands a tenth below Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (8.5), the nearest Victorian fantasy of a girl in a world under the ground, which leads it most on Pressure on Tradition, 9.0 to 8.0, and trails it on The Sublime; a tenth below Ash-Wednesday (8.5), the nearest devotional lyric of renunciation; and above Milton’s Comus (8.1), another temptation refused by a young woman, whose myth is argued where Rossetti’s is built, and Millais’s Ophelia (8.1), the Pre-Raphaelite neighbour on the visual desk. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (8.6) and Browning’s Men and Women (8.7) stand above it, and the two great lyric bodies of the century stand well above: Dickinson’s Poems (8.9), which leads by a full point on The Swerve and on Pressure on Tradition, and Les Fleurs du mal (9.1). The book is kept from the summit by its sum and by the Epochal Gate, which The Unconcealment, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition do not clear.
Act III · The Twelve
The title poem is close to unsubtractable. Its long catalogues of fruit look like excess and are the temptation itself: the list is the market’s patter, and to cut it would cut the appetite the poem is about. Jeanie, the girl who ate before and died of it, is a few lines, and carries the whole threat of what Laura will become. The sisters’ night, Laura’s wasting, Lizzie’s ordeal and the recovery each bear weight, and the coda, “For there is no friend like a sister”, is the thesis given to the children it names. The cap is set by the book, not the poem: the ballads repeat one plot of the jilted or betrayed woman, the devotional pieces restate one another, and a volume without a third of its poems would know almost all it knows.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the book brings into the open is a condition, not a mood: appetite as a market, in which the woman pays with her body, “Buy from us with a golden curl”, and the thing bought wastes the buyer. Laura, having eaten, can no longer hear the goblins while her sister still can: indulgence deafens the indulged to the very call she craves, and only another’s bodily sacrifice, “Eat me, drink me, love me”, restores her. The lyrics disclose a second condition as exactly: the self that keeps its secret, love that would rather be forgotten than grieved, death imagined as rest and not as judgement. Held at 8.3 because the two disclosures do not meet in one statement, and because the allegory’s openness, which is its yield, keeps what it states from being stated.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The book rises often, and at two pitches. The cold pitch: “Does the road wind up-hill all the way? / Yes, to the very end”, sixteen lines that make a pilgrimage of plain questions; the turn of “Remember” into its sestet; “Echo”, “Come to me in the silence of the night”, the dead lover called back by a voice that already knows he will not come. The hot pitch is the title poem’s two great passages: Lizzie standing firm in the glen while the goblins smear the juice on her face, and Laura’s fever of recovery, the fire in her veins, likened to a watch-tower shaken down in an earthquake. “A Birthday”, “My heart is like a singing bird”, is an elevation of joy, rarer in her. The devotional section rises seldom, and the ballads not at all.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Here the book builds rather than evokes. “Goblin Market” makes load-bearing myth from the grammar of the fairy tale: two sisters, the forbidden fruit of a world under the hill, the earlier girl who died of it, the descent of the second sister into the place of danger, and her return with the remedy carried on her body. The Fall and the Eucharist are both in the structure and neither is an allusion: Laura falls by eating, and is saved by eating the fruit’s juices from a body offered for her, “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices”. The girls stay particular, in a cottage with cows and bees and a brook. “Up-Hill” makes the pilgrim’s inn of a whole life. Elsewhere myth is setting, the convent, the dead bride, the grave, which keeps the axis from the top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The title poem’s departure is real and cost something. Its metre swings out of every expected English measure: lines of two stresses beside lines of four, rhymes delayed or bunched, a nursery rhythm used for an adult fable of appetite and rescue, and set at the head of a first book. The swerve in matter is as large: a redemption myth with no man at its centre, in which a woman saves a woman bodily, and a fairy tale in which the erotic is unhidden and the shape is still claimed as Christian. Against this, the lyrics refine an inherited instrument, Petrarch’s sonnet, the hymn and the ballad, rather than break it, and their reticence is a manner that Herbert and the hymnal had prepared. One great swerve and one fine inheritance: 8.3.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form of “Goblin Market” and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The goblins’ cry, “Come buy, come buy”, the tumbling short lines and the lists that run on past need are the sound of the temptation: the reader feels the market’s rush before the poem judges it, and the verdict depends on that complicity. In blank verse or a regular stanza the appetite would become a description. “Up-Hill” is the second proof: its quatrains of question and answer enact the soul’s anxious enquiry and the calm reply, so that the form is the faith. “Remember” turns at the volta exactly where the speaker turns from asking to be remembered to releasing the beloved. Elsewhere the ballads are conventional vessels and the devotional pieces fill serviceable hymn measures: the form is the knowledge in the book’s best third, and a container in the rest.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The evidence is demonstrated, not promised. The title poem has borne the Christian reading of Fall, Eucharist and redemption, the erotic and lesbian readings, the economic reading of the market and the woman’s price, readings of addiction and of anorexia, and the reading as the children’s book it was half made for. Each finds the poem able to hold it, and none has shut the others out; that a poem which names itself a nursery tale is still argued over is the measure of its depth. The lyrics yield less on return, being clear by design, though “Winter: My Secret” and “The Convent Threshold” keep their reserves. Held at 8.6 because the well is mostly one poem deep, and a body of short lyrics, however fine, is returned to more for its sound than for new meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The intrinsic force is high: the title poem reorganises what a narrative poem could be in English in the 1860s, a fairy-tale metre made to carry erotic and sacred weight together, and the lyrics set the standard of the Victorian short lyric of renunciation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the volume was the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, ahead of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s own Poems (1870); Swinburne admired her; the title poem has been reillustrated through the twentieth century and is taught in every survey of Victorian poetry. But the field was English poetry of its decades, and Tennyson and Browning, not Rossetti, redirected it. The force stands near 8.5; the reach nearer 7.5.
Score: 8.0 / 10
A hundred and sixty-four years have passed since 1862, and survival is demonstrated. The text survives whole, from the author’s own volume and fair copy, under a standard variorum. Presence has been continuous: “Remember”, “Up-Hill”, “A Birthday” and “Song” have been anthologised and set to music since her lifetime, and the title poem is taught in every survey of Victorian poetry. Little is fixed to its moment but “In the Round Tower at Jhansi”, the volume’s weakest survivor. Two charges hold the axis at 9.0. Its critical standing sank for some decades after the First World War, when she was read as a minor devotional poet, though the lyrics stayed in anthologies and hymnals and the title poem in print for children; and its widest presence rests on the title poem and a few lyrics more than on the volume as a book.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Her ear is among the surest of her century. The title poem’s irregularity is controlled to the syllable: “Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry”, a falling opening that sets the whole poem’s pulse, and lines that lengthen suddenly where Laura’s craving or Lizzie’s endurance needs breath. “She sucked until her lips were sore” is eight monosyllables of plain intensity. The lyrics are exact in another way: “Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget”, the shortened last line of “Song” falling away as the speaker does; “Remember” holding its imperative through the octave and then letting it go. Diction is plain, rhyme rich without strain, repetition used as incantation. The charges: some ballads fall into stock diction, and the devotional pieces repeat a formula of weariness and longing, “I have no wit, no words, no tears”, until it reads as a manner.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant things in the book: the goblin men, one cat-faced, one tramping at a rat’s pace, in their riot of fruit and voices, and the bare devotional lyric of a soul asking to be quickened. One law governs both: desire is real, its present object deceives or withholds, and satisfaction is deferred to a love that costs the body or to death and what lies beyond it. Renunciation is the volume’s physics, and the title poem, which looks like its exception, is its fullest statement: Laura’s indulgence is punished, and Lizzie’s refusal to eat is the saving act. The range is wide, from fairy myth to ballad to sonnet to hymn. Held at 8.3 because the ballads’ jilted brides and bitter sisters run on stock causes rather than that law, and “Jhansi”, an incident of the Indian rising, sits outside it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a book of lyrics and one long narrative poem can hold, much is held. The title poem integrates the market and its exchange, the household and sisterhood, the body’s appetite and its wasting, the sacred economy of sacrifice and redemption, the natural order of brook, bee, cow and season, and the passage of generations in the coda’s children. The lyrics add death, the grave and what may follow it, and love possessed and lost; “In the Round Tower at Jhansi” glances at empire and war. In “Goblin Market” these are held, not listed; across the volume they sit side by side in separate poems more than in one structure. What holds the axis at 7.6, the lowest of the twelve, is that the state, history and labour enter only by the market’s figure and a single topical piece.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.8: a text whole under a standard variorum and a presence continuous for a hundred and sixty-four years, in anthologies, in song and in every survey of Victorian poetry; and an ear controlled to the syllable, in the title poem’s irregular measure and the turns of “Remember” and “Song”. The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well follow at 8.6, both carried by the title poem.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: the title poem holds the market, the household, the body, the sacred and the natural order in one structure, but across the volume the orders sit side by side in separate poems, and the state, history and labour enter only by figure and one topical piece. Among the gated axes The Inevitable is lowest, at 7.8, charged for ballads that repeat one plot and devotional pieces that restate one another.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.8, The Living Form at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls two tenths short, its two disclosures, of appetite as a market and of the self that withholds, never meeting in one statement; The Swerve at 8.3 falls two tenths short, one great departure in the title poem set against lyrics that refine an inherited instrument; and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 falls five tenths short, its force high but its reach diffuse in a field that Tennyson and Browning redirected. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Inevitable at 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The twelve sum to 100.2; the aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the book is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing of 8.4.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems, Macmillan, London and Cambridge, 1862, her first trade volume, as published: the title poem, the secular lyrics and ballads, and the closing “Devotional Pieces”. The two designs by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, frontispiece and title page, are context and not the work. The edition of 1865 and the collected Poems of 1875, which merged this book with The Prince’s Progress (1866), are not the object. English is the original; no translation stands between. The poems weighed most are “Goblin Market”, “Up-Hill”, “Remember”, “Echo”, “A Birthday”, “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), “After Death”, “Winter: My Secret”, “The Convent Threshold”, “In the Round Tower at Jhansi”, “Cousin Kate”, “An Apple-Gathering”, “From House to Home”, “A Better Resurrection” and “Advent”; the title poem is known closest, the ballads and the devotional section by their outlines and some lines. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, no line counts are given beyond the forms of particular lyrics, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotations are short, given only where their words are certain, and cited by poem; everything else is paraphrased. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the line count of the title poem and the date of its fair copy, the number of poems in the book and their exact running order, which ballads stood in this volume rather than a later one, the early advice on the title poem’s metre from within the poet’s circle, the poet’s work with fallen women and its bearing on the poem, the later illustrated editions by name, and the critical studies that led the book’s revival.