Jonty Claypole

Goblin Market was a huge success, seeming to capture something about the age, although nobody could say what.

The poem has been interpreted as a parable on the fall of Eve.

I hope, Sophie, you're going to talk about Milton's Paradise Lost later in relation to that.

On the dangers of sex, of addiction, of madness.

It is all of these things.

And yet its enduring brilliance lies in its ambiguity.

Rossetti is a master of what we discussed last episode, negative capability, which is no accident, Sophie, because John Keats, who coined the term, was a huge influence on Christina Rossetti.

And negative capability for anyone who hasn't heard that episode or listened to various Silicon Valley tech bros wittering on about the term is an unnecessarily confusing phrase for the way a great poet relishes ambiguity, letting their work sit in the unknown.

In this episode, I will be playing Laura to Sophie's Lizzie as we descend into the Victorian subconscious, the goblin market, to work out exactly what is going on in this brilliant and truly bizarre poem.

Sophie, you'll be relieved to know, however, I'm not going to extend my inhabiting of Laura to the extent of licking your face.

So you're safe for that part.

Thank you.

We've got some treats, or should I say succulent fruit globes, in store, including fairy mythology, a quirky religious movement, of course, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the enigma of Christina Rossetti herself, and of course, more wombats.

remarkable originality of this poem so i think what we're going to do is do kind of greatest hits moments just to give you a flavor of what goblin market sounds like if you've never read it yeah so the story begins with two sisters who discover a goblin route in the countryside a little secret passage in the undergrowth where the goblins who are little fair and we should talk later about what exactly a goblin is head towards the goblin market with their fruits but

This is how the poem begins.

Morning and evening, maids heard the goblins cry.

Come by our orchard fruits, come by, come by.

Apples and quinces, lemons and oranges, plump, unpecked cherries, melons and raspberries.

Bloom down, cheeked peaches, swart-headed mulberries, wild, free-born cranberries, crab apples, dewberries, pineapples, blackberries, apricots, strawberries, all ripe together.

In summer weather, morns that pass by, fair eves that fly,