Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894), 1862
★ 4.09 from 17.4k ratings on Goodreads
Poems of goblin fruit, ghostly visitors and stubborn refusals, by a Victorian who made longing sound like a nursery rhyme. Rossetti's poems move like sung nursery rhymes, sweet on the surface, with longing, grief and faith running underneath at a measured, unhurried pace.
Feels like longing and melancholy. About love, death and faith.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy Victorian poetry that keeps a ballad's sing-song while carrying real emotional weight, and you don't mind religious questioning. Be warned that the diction is often archaic and the mood frequently bleak — sin, death and self-loathing recur — and the longer narrative poems take patience.
Why read it
These are poems to read for the sound as much as the sense: Rossetti can make refusal, longing and faith feel like something you already knew by heart.
Pages from the book
The heaviest thing you will ever have to carry is yourself.
God strengthen me to bear myself;That heaviest weight of all to bear,Inalienable weight of care.All others are outside myself,I lock my door and bar them outThe turmoil, tedium, gad-about.I lock my door upon myself,And bar them out; but who shall wallSelf from myself, most loathed of all?If I could once lay down myself,And start self-purged upon the raceThat all must run! Death runs apace. A shut mouth can be its own kind of refusal.
One may lead a horse to water,Twenty cannot make him drink.Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,Coaxed and fought her,Bullied and besought her,Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,Kicked and knocked her,Mauled and mocked her,Lizzie uttered not a word;Would not open lip from lipLest they should cram a mouthful in: The thing you love by daylight has a different face at night.
By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:But all night as the moon so changeth she;Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosyAnd subtle serpents gliding in her hair.By day she woos me to the outer air,Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:But through the night, a beast she grins at me,A very monster void of love and prayer.By day she stands a lie: by night she standsIn all the naked horror of the truthWith pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.Is this a friend indeed; that I should sellMy soul to her, give her my life and youth,Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell? More passages from Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Christina Rossetti.Rossetti broke off her engagement to the painter James Collinson when he became a Roman Catholic, and later declined Charles Bagot Cayley, whom she loved.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy Victorian poetry that keeps a ballad's sing-song while carrying real emotional weight, and you don't mind religious questioning. Be warned that the diction is often archaic and the mood frequently bleak — sin, death and self-loathing recur — and the longer narrative poems take patience.
- What is Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems like?
- Rossetti's poems move like sung nursery rhymes, sweet on the surface, with longing, grief and faith running underneath at a measured, unhurried pace. Feels like longing and melancholy. About love, death and faith.
- What should I read after Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems?
- If you liked Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems, try Poetry (John Donne), Sonnets from the Portuguese (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore).
A taste of the feed
What if surrender is the only route out of captivity?
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Poetry · John Donne
What it costs to hand someone the ashes of your grief.
I lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up—those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
Sonnets from the Portuguese · Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A wish for a last song that holds every kind of joy.
Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.
Gitanjali · Rabindranath Tagore
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