![]() ![]() ![]() In this post we have tried to condense the huge critical debate – and various interpretations – of ‘Goblin Market’ into one short article. That feverishly odd ‘aguish’ has indeed hardened into ‘anguish’, the anguish of the not-known. Who knows? The fruit in the Garden of Eden offered life in the form of pleasure and worldly knowledge (including carnal knowledge, or awareness of one’s own sexuality) but it also led to death, the death of paradise. The eye is apt to stumble over ‘aguish’, wanting to correct it to ‘anguish’ but, like the word itself, we are caught in a feverish world we can only half-comprehend, much less analyse. She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth. Words themselves are unstable, ripe (like the fruit) to enchant us and then unsettle us with their cunning: The unpredictability of the line lengths, rhymes, and rhythms of ‘Goblin Market’ echoes the unpredictable fairy-tale world of the goblins. The poem’s metrical form invites comment and analysis: its rhythm is irregular and songlike, as with so many of Christina Rossetti’s poems, though they are usually more regular in their use of metre and rhythm, and their rhyme schemes tend to be slightly more ordered. The art critic John Ruskin (who coined the phrase ‘pathetic fallacy’) said that in ‘Goblin Market’ Rossetti was ‘violating the common ear for metre’. ![]()
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