Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
Quick answer: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti explained: the story of Laura and Lizzie, the poem's strange music, its layered meanings, and craft lessons for poets.
No Victorian poem is stranger than Goblin Market, and few are better. Published in 1862, Christina Rossetti's long narrative follows two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who hear goblin merchants crying their forbidden fruit at twilight. Laura buys with a lock of her hair, tastes, and begins to waste away. Lizzie, to save her, walks into the goblin glen and endures their assault without opening her lips, carrying home the juices that restore her sister.
Readers have called it a fairy tale, a religious allegory, a poem about addiction, a poem about desire, and a celebration of sisterhood. It is all of these at once, which is exactly why it repays close reading. Here is how the poem moves, how it sounds, and what it can teach you.
What the poem says
The poem opens with the goblins' street cry, a long, luscious catalogue of fruit: apples, quinces, lemons, oranges, plump unpecked cherries, and on for over two dozen lines. The catalogue is itself a temptation, and Rossetti means you to feel it. Laura and Lizzie crouch among the brookside rushes; Lizzie warns that they must not look at goblin men, but Laura lingers, looks, and buys, paying with a golden curl since she has no coin.
Having eaten, Laura can no longer hear the goblin cry. She dwindles, her hair turns thin and grey, and she stops eating and working. Rossetti places a warning figure in the backstory: Jeanie, a girl who tasted the fruit, pined, and died. Lizzie remembers Jeanie and decides to act. She takes a silver penny to the glen, and when she refuses to eat with the goblins, they claw, pinch, and press fruit against her closed mouth until she stands drenched in juice but unbroken.
Lizzie runs home and invites Laura to kiss the juices from her face. The taste, now bitter, works like an antidote. Laura passes through a night of fiery anguish and wakes restored. A short coda shows both sisters years later as mothers, telling their children the story and concluding that there is no friend like a sister.
How it works
Rossetti's metre is famously irregular. Lines swell and shrink, rhymes arrive at unpredictable distances, and the effect is closer to chant or nursery spell than to polite Victorian verse. Critics at the time found it lawless; poets since have recognised how precisely the looseness is controlled. The goblin cry sections rock along on short, insistent lines, while the emotional passages open out into longer, statelier movement.
Her imagery works by sensory overload. The fruit is described with such tactile relish that the reader shares Laura's fall before it happens. Then the same register is reversed: the juice that tempted becomes the medicine that burns. Using one image system for both poison and cure is the poem's structural masterstroke.
The animal similes deserve attention too. The goblins are catlike, ratlike, snail-paced, one like a wombat, one like a ratel. Making the tempters part menagerie keeps them just far enough from human to stay uncanny, and just close enough to be leering salesmen.
Why it lasts
Goblin Market survives because it refuses to settle into one meaning. Read it as Christian allegory and Lizzie's ordeal, offering her own body to redeem her sister, maps onto sacrifice and communion. Read it as a poem about appetite and addiction, and Laura's craving, tolerance, and withdrawal feel clinically observed. Read it as a poem about the market in the title, and it becomes a shrewd study of what women were asked to pay for what men were selling.
Rossetti herself called it a fairy tale and volunteered no key. That reticence, combined with verse music unlike anyone else's, has kept the poem alive in classrooms and anthologies for a century and a half. It also quietly widened what women's poetry was allowed to do: sensuous, violent, and strange, with two women as tempted, tempter's victim, and rescuer, and no marriage plot in sight.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the catalogue as temptation. When you want a reader to feel desire rather than be told about it, list the desired things in dense sensory detail and let the rhythm accelerate. Rossetti proves that a list, handled with enough relish, is dramatic action.
Steal the reversed image system as well. Whatever image embodies your poem's danger, let the same image return transformed as its resolution. One motif doing double duty gives a long poem unity that no amount of plot can supply. It is the kind of structural echo that contest judges reward when they score structure and theme, because it shows design rather than accident.
What poets can take from this
- Let line length and rhyme distance vary with emotional temperature instead of staying fixed.
- Describe temptation through the senses; never label it as temptation.
- Reuse your central image in an inverted role at the poem's climax.
- Give supernatural figures a few precise animal comparisons to keep them uncanny.
- Plant a cautionary backstory figure (like Jeanie) to raise the stakes without a narrator's lecture.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in which something sold at a market can only be paid for with a part of the buyer's self, and follow the price through to its cure.
Questions
What is Goblin Market really about?
On the surface it is a fairy tale about two sisters and forbidden fruit. Underneath, readers find themes of temptation and redemption, addiction and recovery, sisterly love, and the dangers of the marketplace for Victorian women. Rossetti never fixed a single meaning, and the poem supports several at once.
What form is Goblin Market written in?
It is written in irregular, heavily rhymed verse with lines of widely varying length and no fixed metre. The looseness is deliberate: it lets Rossetti shift between chant-like goblin cries and slower emotional passages within one continuous poem.
Who saves Laura in Goblin Market?
Her sister Lizzie. She confronts the goblins, refuses to eat, and endures their violence so the fruit juices smeared on her face can act as an antidote. Laura kisses the juice from her sister's cheeks and recovers, which is why the poem ends by praising sisterhood.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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