Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

After reading the never ending poem called "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, i had mixed first impressions. I thought the poem was very unusual and weird, especially the start and ending, but i also thought that once i discover the meaning behind all the small, strange details in the poem and study its poetic devices i will start to understand and realise its effectiveness.

In my previous English lesson we looked at the first several stanzas and concluded what some of the details really signify. I really enjoyed the lesson as it became clear to me what the start of the poem is trying to suggest and as we began to annotate my interest grew in the implications of the poem. After reading the first stanza, which includes a list of hundreds of fruits, i realised it was trying to suggest ideas of gluttony and sexual temptation. The words "come buy" are repeated which shows that the goblins are trying to tempt the maids, women that represent innocence and youth, to buy their fruits. Also, the words "unpecked" and "ripe" suggest virginity therefore the idea of sexual temptation is formed in the readers mind, but this did not come clear to me at first! Additionally, the reader may think that Rossetti is attempting to interoperate a theme of religion. In the bible, God tells Adam and Eve not to touch the tree that gives knowledge of good and evil as the day you eat the fruit, you will die. They however give into temptation after the persuasion of a serpent and are punished by God. This therefore shows that the Goblin men could represent the serpent as they persuade Laura into eating their fruits which leads to consequences.

Furthermore, as you read deeper into the poem you are given a description of the globins appearance. Before the description is given, Rossetti makes the reader believe that the goblins are nice, pleasant creatures as they sounded "kind and full of loves" so when we discover that they "crawled like a snail" and had "cat's" faces, this plants a grotesque and disturbing image in the readers mind. In addition, when i read the part where Laura gives in to the goblins temptation and she "sucked" the fruit that are "sweeter than honey from the rock", "stronger than man-rejoicing wine" and "clearer than water flowed that juice" i started to consider the idea of the fruit and the goblins being very similar by the way they mislead people. The goblins sound nice but they are unappealing to the eye which suggests that they are not to be trusted and we in actual fact find out that they are deceptive creatures later on in the poem. This is comparable to the fruits and their supernatural, addictive taste because during the end of the poem it reveals that the fruit has negatively affected Laura's youth and health, therefore the fruit is misleading as well as the goblins.

I am really looking forward to looking at what certain details symbolise and represent and after my last English lesson I am keen to read further into the poem whilst picking out the unobvious symbolisms, devices and meanings behind words and phrases that most readers, like me, tend to not realise.