So, as I had hoped, I did go back to Browseabout Books and pick up a copy of  Goblin Market and Other Poems.

And yes, the title poem is about goblins. And sex. Kinky sex, too.

And there’s some kind of Victorian moral in there, but it gets subverted.

There is the ‘good’ sister Lizzie (shades of the smart, tough minded Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Bennett?) and the ‘bad’ sister Laura (the sister/sister dichotomy, usually turned on its head a bit, appears in some other poems, notable Cousin Kate [yes, it’s technically cousins, but don’t quibble about these little things with me]).

The goblins are heard hawking delicious fruits in the forest, a sound heard from, as it were, just around the corner. It is already assumed that this is one of those temptations one should avoid.

Lizzie clutches Laura, encouraging her to hide from the goblins with ‘With clasping arms and cautioning lips,/With tingling cheeks and fingertips.’ This should give you a hint that everything in this poem will sound (at least to my ears) sexually charged.

The goblins are ugly, of course, but the way they are depicted… well, to use a reference folks from my generation will understand, I would say that the goblins of the movie Labyrinth are based on this. There is no David Bowie with his tall, lean form and aggressive/ambiguous sexuality, but that combination of terror and desire is definitely there.

What’s more, Lizzie tells her sister not to ‘peep’ and ‘goblin men.‘ The emphasis is mine. They are men – not creatures or monsters, but men. Men implies many things, but combined with the word ‘peep’ (peeping through keyholes into the bathroom), you can see these are not just mischievous imps, but grown things, with something (adult genitalia?) to peep at.

Laura succumbs to temptation. What happens next? Laura ‘sucked their fruit globes,’ drank honey ‘stronger than man-rejoicing wine’ and ‘sucked until her lips were sore.’ Is this even being disguised? Tell me this isn’t a young woman discovering the joys of heterosexual sex (and possibly rejecting lesbian sexuality in rejecting the cautions of her sister’s lips). And she pays not with money (she doesn’t have any), but with a lock of her hair and a single tear. In other words, this is not a monetary transaction, but a bodily one.

So, the ‘bad’ sister eats the fruit and then proceeds to wither away, mainly because she cannot hear the goblins anymore, they no longer appear to her (she is damaged goods, having given up her fruit chastity, so the goblin men are no longer interested).

Lizzie finally goes to find the goblins, who still want to sell her their fruit because she is untainted. But she wants to pay with money, rather than with part of herself, and also wants to give the fruit to her sister, not eat it herself right then and there.

The goblins react by ‘Tearing her gown and soiling her stocking.’ They ‘clutched her hair,’ and tried to ‘cram’ their fruit between her lips, but she stood firm ‘Like a royal virgin town.’ Good lord, it’s a barely disguised attempted rape. This is actually treading on territory mined by the Marquis de Sade in his novels Justine and Juliette.

The juice from the goblin’s fruit is now smeared on her lips and face, though she hasn’t swallowed any, so she goes home to Laura and cries:

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;

While Laura kisses her ‘with hungry mouth,’ these fruits of men are no longer tasteful, but burn her mouth and taste vile. But, it also enables her to recover from her malaise and they two of them go on to marry (men, of course) and have kids.

But what are we to make of this?

There’s a moral, certainly, about not succumbing to temptation, but after that, it gets very confusing. Maybe it’s a religious thing, like those Christian women poets of the baroque who made solitary (non-eucharistic) communion with Christ sound like an erotic experience.

In which case, Lizzie is a martyr redeeming Laura after having submitted to torture by the pagan goblins.

Now I’m just waiting for a real Rossetti scholar to tell me how I’m wrong (which I’m sure I am – I haven’t done much textual analysis in a long time).