Close reading of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’ (1859-1862)

Close reading of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Goblin Market’ (1859-1862)

She cried “Laura,” up the garden,                                                            

“Did you miss me?                                  465

Come and kiss me.

Never mind my bruises,

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices                                                               

Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,

Goblin pulp and goblin dew.                     470

Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me:

For your sake I have braved the glen

And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

Laura started from her chair,                     475

Flung her arms up in the air, Clutched her hair:

“Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted For my sake the fruit forbidden?

Must your light like mine be hidden,           480

Your young life like mine be wasted,

Undone in mine undoing,

And ruined in my ruin,

Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?” —

She clung about her sister,                        485       

Kissed and kissed and kissed her:

Tears once again

Refreshed her shrunken eyes,

Dropping like rain

After long sultry drouth;                           490

Shaking with aguish^[1] fear, and pain,

She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.

Her lips began to scorch,

That juice was wormwood to her tongue,

She loathed the feast:                                495

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              500

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,                       505

Or like a flying flag when armies run.

Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart,

Met the fire smouldering there

And overbore its lesser flame;

She gorged on bitterness without a name:   510

Ah! fool, to choose such part Of soul-consuming care!

Sense failed in the mortal strife:

Like the watch-tower of a town

Which an earthquake shatters down,          515

Like a lightning-stricken mast,

Like a wind-uprooted tree

Spun about,

Like a foam-topped waterspout

Cast down headlong in the sea,                  520

She fell at last;

Pleasure past and anguish past, Is it death or is it life?

Life out of death.

That night long Lizzie watched by her,        525

Counted her pulse's flagging stir,

Felt for her breath,

Held water to her lips, and cooled her face With tears and fanning leaves:

But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,   530       

And early reapers plodded to the place

Of golden sheaves,

And dew-wet grass

Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,

And new buds with new day                                535

Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream,

Laura awoke as from a dream,

Laughed in the innocent old way,

Hugged Lizzie but not^[2] twice or thrice;

Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,  540 
Her breath was sweet as May And light danced in her eyes.

Days, weeks, months, years

Afterwards, when both were wives

With children of their own;                                    545

Their mother-hearts beset with fears,

Their lives bound up in tender lives;

Laura would call the little ones

And tell them of her early prime,

Those pleasant days long gone                              550

Of not-returning time:

Would talk about the haunted glen,

The wicked, quaint^[3] fruit-merchant men,

Their fruits like honey to the throat

But poison in the blood;                                        555

(Men sell not such in any town:)

Would tell them how her sister stood In deadly peril to do her good, And win the fiery antidote:

Then joining hands to little hands                           560

Would bid them cling together,

“For there is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,                            565

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.”

                                                     [END OF PAPER]

            In this essay, I will discuss an extract of the poem ‘Goblin Market’ of Christina Rossetti. First, I will analyse the structure, genre, and theme of the poem and its relation to its historical moment. Secondly, I will do a close reading of the poem, analysing it stanza by stanza and taking into account the different rhetorical devices that appear in itself. Finally, I will give a general opinion of the poem.

    Goblin Market is a narrative poem composed in 1859 and published in 1862. It was written in the Victorian Age (1830-1901), a period of industrialization, where there was a class consciousness and where women began to be taught in other things apart from music or drawing. The main themes are numerous in this poem, one of them is women and femininity, because ‘Goblin Market’ is a woman’s world where there are no male characters and this is going to be very relevant in the development of the story. Another theme is the sexual one, which, despite being a poem dedicated for children according to the author, there is an erotic imagery, as for instance goblin’s fruits used as a metaphor for sex, and there is also a sensual language used between the two sisters. Fruits can also be seen as drugs, as one of the sisters (Laura) became addicted to them, so we can say that the theme of drugs is also presented in this poem. Finally, the last of the main themes I can mention is the theme of violence, presented in the part where Lizzie is attacked by the goblins or in eating the food if it is interpreted as the loss of virginity.

    Most of the poem is written in iambic tetrameter, but its rhyme is irregular, although there are innumerable couplets in the poem. The six stanzas we are going to analyse have an irregular amount of lines, being the first stanza shorter than the other ones. The narrator of this poem is, in general, an objective third-person narrator who is describing what the two sisters are doing, although in the extract, we see that there are some exceptions, as for instance, in lines 511 and 512, where the narrator breaks out with this and addresses to Laura directly, losing the objectivity.

The extract of the poem we are about to analyse belongs to the last part of the poem, I am going to collect the main ideas of each stanza in order to give my own opinion. On the one hand, the first stanza can be seen from a sexual point of view, in which fruits can have been used as a metaphor for sex. In the stanza, we see that Lizzie enters the house inviting Laura to lick up the goblin fruit juice off her. However, seeing the language used by Lizzie asking Laura to do it, we see that it’s pretty erotic ‘Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices’ (l.468) repeating nearly the same structure (parallelism) just a few lines later ‘Eat me, drink me, love me’ (l. 471). Lizzie was even wounded by the goblins, but with this figurative language, the meaning of being reunited changes for a great reason to be happy to a sexual one. If, on the other hand, we see this stanza as it were for children, the meaning changes and we only see the love between sisters, that is to say, Lizzie saving Laura from death, and the bravery of Lizzie for having fought against the goblins.

The second stanza of the extract is about how the reencounter is produced between both sisters and how Laura drinks the juice. As in the first stanza, we can see the second one from two points of view, in spite of the fact that the erotic one, in my view, prevails from the other. Laura is worried about Lizzie because she didn’t know if she had eaten ‘the fruit forbidden’ (l. 479) (religious reference from the story of Adam and Eve). Afterwards, there is a contrast that Laura makes comparing herself to Lizzie ‘Must your light like mine be hidden’ (l.480) and ‘Your young life like mine be wasted’ (l.481) transmitting pessimism about her situation. She continues emphasizing her bad situation and she doesn’t want to drag Lizzie down. Then we see how Laura returns to life thanks to the goblin’s juice. The word ‘kiss’ is repeated three times, making an emphasis in the sisterhood love, and we observe that Laura returns to life because she is able to cry again. In my opinion, now she is crying because of the relief of being alive, so it is a good aspect. In the final lines of the stanza I believe there is an element of greed and desire, especially it says ‘She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth’ (l.492), but at the same time she’s transmitting affection and gratitude to her sister that has saved her.

In the third stanza, we see that this juice doesn’t taste good and she acts as she is possessed when she drinks it, suffering because of it in burning her lips and it is ‘wormwood to her tongue’ (l.494). I’ve interpreted this passage of the stanza as some kind of cure or sacrilege done to a person possessed by an evil spirit that wants to take out all the evilness of his body. In the second part of the stanza, Laura is described with several similes, as for example in line 503 ‘Or like an eagle when she stems the light’, describing her liberation from the poison, from the evil spirits. She is compared to ‘a mane of horses’, ‘an eagle’, ‘a flag’ and even to the Olympic torch (in lines 500 and 501), all of them referring to her new freedom and liberation from the goblin’s poison. This new freedom of Laura made me think about all the social movements led by women in the Victorian era in order to have equal opportunities to work and to have similar salaries as men. For this reason, I consider that the author is referring to femininity and women’s liberation. Furthermore, the author can be also referring to the exclusion of women from the male-dominated artistic world during this era, like Christina Rossetti herself with her brothers as, despite the fact that they encouraged her writing, they did not allow her to become an official member of their artistic movement.

    Now the fourth stanza deals with Laura’s healing start to act with a ‘lesser flame’ (l.509). Nevertheless, the most important fact of this stanza is the narrator’s intrusion in the argument of the story, losing thereby, all the objectiveness of the narration. It seems to me that the narrator did this so as to do more emphasis on the fact that Laura made a bad decision. He talks in the first person and directly to Laura, creating at the same time a climax in the narration. Another point of view to see this part of the poem is the religious one, when God expels Eve from the Garden of Eden because she ate the forbidden fruit, in this case, the voice of the narrator would be God and Laura would be Eve. Further on, there are again several similes comparing her struggle to live to ‘watch-tower’ (l.514), a ‘mast’ (l.516) or a ‘wind-uprooted tree’ (l.517). All these things are fighting against natural forces, so personally, I think that the author is trying to emphasize the difficulty of this struggle against life because natural forces can be stopped. And suddenly, Laura loses her consciousness or ‘spun about’ (l.518) and she casts down. In the final lines of the stanza, the author makes more dramatism and suspense, we don’t know if she feels ‘pleasure’ or ‘anguish’ and with a final rhetorical question, ‘Is it death or is it life?’ we don’t even know if those were her last feelings. I believe that in this stanza Christina Rossetti wanted to make an atmosphere of suspense and it is the exact moment where the climax is produced. In relation to the style, I’ve realized that the lines becone shorter and shorter at the end of the stanza and this creates a more suspense effect.

    In the following stanza, the poet will answer the previous rhetorical question, answering ‘Life out of death’ (l.524), nonetheless in a confusing way, because if the meaning is that Laura came back to life, it can be seen as a miracle. On the contrary, if it is a figurative way, there is no miracle. Lizzie gives her water and she cries again and the atmosphere changes into a better one. Nature returns to the scene to play an important role and now it is dawning. There is an important aspect in this stanza and it’s the fact that Laura is becoming younger and returning to life, fresh as ‘lilies’ (l.536) and her hair is returning to be blonde (before it was grey). In my view, Laura is returning to life and as in the same poem it is said ‘Laura awoke as from a dream’ (l.537), in other words, as it was before, as if the whole story had been a nightmare from which she had finally woken up. All this happiness is now reflected in nature, in a spring atmosphere, ‘Her breath was sweet as May’ (l.541). If we consider as valid the religious background we mentioned before, we can see this as the resurrection of Laura and her return to a perfect life.

    In the last part of the poem, there is a flash forward ‘Days, weeks, months, years’ (l.543) and there is a contrast between past and present that I am going to explain. Firstly, we see that both sisters are now married with children, so femininity became again a main theme in the poem. In my opinion, this aspect is relevant, because men aren’t mentioned in the whole poem, but after all, we observe that there is a man’s influence in this woman’s world. We can interpret this fact as a good or bad aspect. On the one hand, if we see it in a pessimistic way, we can believe that the only man’s influence is related to marriage and their only function is to have children. On the other hand, we can see it as the fact that they also bring happiness to women, because together they are creating a family. Nonetheless, having in mind Rossetti’s personal life and how her brothers and father didn’t let her participate in the literary world at first, I would see this part of the poem in a pessimistic way. Then, Laura and Lizzie tell their children the story in a moral way, showing them how important the love between sisters is. Laura also talks about Lizzie’s heroism for having saved her. In line 556 the word ‘men’ is mentioned to say that they didn’t sell the fruit that goblins sell in any town, meaning that this fruit wasn’t normal, because as it is said in the poem, the fruit tasted like honey, but it was ‘poisoned in blood’ (l.555). Finally, the poem ends by repeating the story to the children and saying ‘there is no friend like a sister’, which is the moral of the story,

    To sum up, this extract of the poem can be criticised and analysed from several points of view. However, in my view, I wouldn’t consider it as a poem for children, because of all its erotic background: related to the fruit and the sisters action, in spite of the fact that there is a moral conclusion in the last stanza. I have also found quite interesting the fact that it was a woman’s world and having into account that it was written in the Victorian era, I have realised about the possible difficulties of writing it. Religion has also been another main theme in this final extract of the poem and we can consider it as an act of social redemption of Laura for having eaten the fruit, as Eve in the Garden of Eden.

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[1]feverish

[2]notonly

[3]strange

The origin of the Irish Nationalism and its evolution after the Irish War of Independence

The origin of the Irish Nationalism and its evolution after the Irish War of Independence

In this essay, I am going to discuss about the origin of Ireland as a nation and how the nationalism evolved after the Irish War of Independence against Britain, dividing the essay in two main parts. With this in mind, in this essay we will always take into account three main aspects: socio-economic, religious, political and historical, so that we can have the context and the reasons why it happened. This essay will also be seen from two different perspectives: the British because Britain was the nation which dominated Ireland until the Irish nationalism emerged, and the other is the Irish, seeing how their thinking was changing until they decided to become a nation.

When did it begin?

There are many events in history that could have determined the origin of the Irish nationalism, that is to say, the beginning of Irish history as a nation. But when can one talk about Irish nationalism? In 1904, a man called Eoin MacNeill, an Irish scholar and also politician, asked himself that question giving a lecture. He said it could be considered that its beginning was in the Gaelic or pre-Normand period, in other words, a traditional period of Ireland. Or even it could have started in the 16^th century, in a revolutionary period. (Boyce, 2003:15)

Other aspects that he also took into account were the religious ones: on the one hand, during the 1640s when there was a big Catholic movement and, on the other hand, with the Protestants of the eighteenth century. And last but not least important, the author refers to the modern aspect, as for instance, the socio-political change of the 19^thcentury of Ireland. It is for this reason that he says that a historian must decide between searching in the more ancient past writing in a theological way or beginning in a more modern period forgetting other historical events.(Boyce, 2003:15).

Therefore now Boyce, bearing in mind all these aspects, first defines the term nationalism to come later to the Irish case. Nationalism, according to him, is the feeling or belief of a community of people that share the same origin (with the same history and literature), that usually have a common language that differs from other nations (not always) and who might have the same religion. Consequently, he argues that this feeling would take on more importance in Ireland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century with the Acts of Union of 1801 with Britain. (Boyce, 2003:16)        

The Act of Union (1^st January 1801)

According to the author Larking in A History of Ireland, and as a result of the French Revolution in 1789, Britain would take advantage of this fact and would have the reason to unify the Kingdom of Ireland to its territory. The most revolutionary Irish leaders of the 19^th century would see this union as a given and would work all this century (within the strict possibilities that Britain allowed them) against this union. The Union banned any possible representation of Irish people in their parliament, which had achieved more autonomy since 1782, forcing the representatives of the Irish parliament to go to the British one, in Westminster.(Larkin H., 2014:9)

From the British point of view, this was an historic and nonviolent act, and it would give Ireland a period of stability, but the most important thing for them was that it was the last step of a process that began with the annexation of Wales in 1535, Scotland in 1707 and finished with Ireland in 1801. (Larkin H., 2014:10)

Nevertheless, for Ireland it wasn’t a “real pacific period” and in time it divided both cultures and communities. England would try to convince Ireland in all the possible aspects showing the benefits of the Union, in the economic aspect they would explain the benefits of a more solid economy that would promote Ireland’s economic growth. However, having such unequal economies was very difficult to have parity in both of them, so it wasn’t as good as they expected (and furthermore if we include that there was a period of corruption).(Larkin H., 2014:15)

From the religious point of view, Larkin says that Ireland was composed of a majority of Catholics (for each Protestant there were three Catholics, proportion which would be just the opposite in the case of the Union between Britain and Ireland, that is, three against twelve, having British more options to control them. It is for this reason that Britain didn’t like the idea of having a Catholic parliament in Ireland. (Larkin H., 2014:15) Despite the fact that there was a Protestant ascendancy with the two major Protestant parties growing more and more (the Crown and the Tory party), the author McCaffrey in The Irish Question : Two Centuries of Conflict says that the Catholic majority refused to accept this pact because they believed that they would be in a huge inferiority. (McCaffrey, 2015:3)

However, it was more than an ideology which was counting for this union according to Larkin’s opinion. On the one hand, there were the Protestants that, even being a small group, monopolised land, politics and society. On the other hand, the Catholics were landless, “politically underprivileged”, poor etc. and controlled by the Protestant elite. This meant that if Protestants were for the Union, the whole Ireland would be part of Britain, and in fact that is what happened. Bearing in mind all these aspects, Catholic masses would have a serious problem of identity, partly because of the dependence on Britain and partly also because they couldn’t be taken into account as a nation. (Larkin H., 2014:4)

In conclusion, this period will create an Irish national sentiment, based mostly in a strong hatred against the British predominance in their territory. This feeling wouldn’t end until after the Irish War of Independence when Ireland was recognised as a country. This would, as well, affect in a devastating way its poor economic situation, which would trigger the Great Famine of Ireland, also known as The Irish potato famine (1845-1852) and one of the biggest migrations of its history. And, last but not least, from the religious point of view, the Catholics would have serious problems (especially in the 19^th century), because of the Anti-Catholic laws of Britain that abolished their human rights like: voting, having a good education or job etc. being even persecuted.

After the Irish War of Independence: The Anglo-Irish Treaty

After the war, in December 1921 England and Ireland would sign The Anglo-Irish Treaty, despite the fact that they did not have much interest in having peace in both territories. This could be explained because in the last stages of the war many violent acts took place, according to what the author Michael Hopkinson says in The Irish War of Independence. The terms discussed in this treaty were: the safeguard of the defence of Ireland, the future of Ulster (an Irish Protestant region formed by six counties that was in favour of the union with Britain), the granting of fiscal autonomy and the self-domain in their twenty-six counties. (Hopkinson, 2002: 177) This treaty, signed by the provisional Irish government and by the British Prime Minister Lloyd George and his asembly of negotiators, had an acceptable degree of independence for his supporters. Nonetheless, for others there would be something missing and that was the partition of Ireland (despite the fact that there was little to discuss because they had already done it that same year). As well, this treaty was not accepted by those who voted against (the anti-Treaties or republicans) as it was inconceivable for them and, therefore, they refused to recognize the Irish Free State. Nevertheless, for the big majority it represented one more step for the Irish freedom, even if with this agreement they would continue to be subordinated to Britain in some economical aspects (Curtis, 2010: 106-107)

Northern and Southern Ireland

Meanwhile in Ireland, as I have mentioned before, the division of the territory affected the region of Ulster (situated in Northern Ireland) and the rest of Ireland. The conflict of Northern Ireland or The Troubles is believed to have a religious origin between Catholics and Protestants, but according to the author Joanne McEvoy the origin lays somewhere else: the national identity. Whilst Nationalists regard the Republic of Ireland as their ‘motherland’, the Unionists consider Britain their country, as they have very different objectives: Unionists want to be part of the United Kingdom and Nationalists want a united Ireland.Of course, in Ireland the religion divisions have always been explicit. It is known that during this period there were many cases of sectarianism because of this issue, but these discrepancies also coincide with other economical differences, historical facts and national political identity.(McEvoy, 2008: 8)

IRA

According to Andrew Sanders, the IRA or Irish Republic Army was considered heir of the Irish Volunteers, a small group of Irish volunteers that took part in the First World War. The Irish Volunteers split from the National Volunteers in 1914 and, encouraged by the Irish Parliamentary Party leader (John Redmond), would give their support to the Allies at the beginning of the war. The remainder was supposed to be a home guard in the Irish territory, but Britain refused to train a disorganised movement which couldn’t provide front-line soldiers, apart from the concern that they could provoke as they could have been used against them in nationalistic terms. As the war progressed worse, news about its divisions in their army arrived in Ireland and the threat of having to go to war increased, whilst support given to the National Volunteers was dicreasing. At the same time, the Irish Volunteers were becoming more and more numerous. That was specially influenced by Britain that created a Republican division in which the most important thing was the pragmatic significance of the war, in other words, what they will achieve at the end of the war. (Sanders, 2011: 1-2)

This movement would continue after the war until the decade of 1970s, when Nothern Ireland would suffer one of the most violent periods in its history. As a result of The ‘Troubles’, over two thousand people would be murdered and half of them in the hands of the Provisional IRA. In August 1969, the Official IRA would be created and it would split with the Provisional one. This movement was established because of the impotence experienced during that decade and with the purpose of being able to change it into a deadly insurgency fast. Nevertheless, they also began to have political activity, as for instance, claiming the recognitions of the parliaments of Stormont or Westminster, but having an extreme socialism orientation. (Sanders, 2011: 45)

The tendency towards politics of the IRA would start as a peace process, according to Sanders, that will be established during the following decades and continued until the 1990s when the IRA would make its final movement with two ceasefires. All this, added with the internal factionism of the movement and the transition of the Irish-American military support to political intervention, would finally end with the most abrupt period in the history of Nothern Ireland. (Sanders, 2011: 191) The beginning of the 21^st century was in an uneasy calm, even if the final year of the previous century had only eight deaths, there was a straight relation between violence and politics that wouldn’t end till the last paramilitary group in Nothern Ireland, the LVF (Loyalist Volunteer Force) was disolved, arresting in October 2005 its leader. (Sanders, 2011: 226-227)

To sum up with this second part of the essay, it could be said that the period between the Irish War of Independence until our days was even more violent in some decades that the war itself. Having two main territorial and political isues, the complete independence of Ireland from Britain and the internal territorial division in the Irish territory, dividing it into two parts: Northern and Southern Ireland. Likewise, I have also discussed about the biggest paramilitary movement emerged in Ireland in the last century, the IRA, which I have considered very important for the understanding of the Irish Nationalism, because it would be crucial in the conflict of Nothern Ireland.

 

Works cited

Boyce, D. G. (2003). Nationalism in Ireland (3). London: Routledge.

Curtis, K. (2010). Anthem Irish Studies : P. S. O'Hegarty (1879-1955) : Sinn Féin Fenian (1). London: Anthem Press.

Hopkinson, M. (2002). The Irish War of Independence. Montreal: MQUP.

Larkin, H. (2014). Anthem Perspectives in History : A History of Ireland 1800–1922 Theatres of Disorder? (1). London: Anthem Press.

McCaffrey, L. J. (2015). The Irish Question : Two Centuries of Conflict (2). Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

McEvoy, J. (2008). Politics Study Guides EUP : Politics of Northern Ireland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sanders, A. (2011). Inside the IRA : Dissident Republicans and the War for Legitimacy (1). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.