Sisterhood, whether Pre-Raphaelite or not, is a challenging state, one which is quite different from that of brotherhood. It is never more challenging than in ‘Goblin Market’, the tale of two sisters, Lizzie and Laura. Laura, recklessly, ‘with a golden curl’, succumbs to the tones ‘as smooth as honey’ of the goblins’ incessant cry to ‘Come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy:’ and, having ‘sucked and sucked and sucked the more . . . until her lips were sore’, finds that yet her ‘mouth waters still’, and she wishes to ‘Buy more’. Alas, the goblins seem to have disappeared and Lizzie, fearful that her sister will die from longing for the juice which has so entranced her, bravely sets out to find them. It is a dangerous endeavour, for when she does they ‘Kicked and knocked her, / Mauled and mocked her’. Lizzie, ‘white and golden’ though dripping in their juice, never allows their poison to pass her lips. She rushes back to Laura and commands her to ‘Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me: / For your sake I have braved the glen / and had to do with goblin merchant men’. Years later this tale of sisterly love (‘there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather’) is recounted by the repentant Laura, when both ‘were wives / With children of their own’. It is a masterpiece of broken yet insistent rhythms so compelling as to seem as irresistible as the goblins’ fruit, with their implied images of the Eucharist that mingle with nursery imagery and impossible-to-ignore luscious sexual innuendo. It is a Miltonian tale of temptation and triumph over evil – his Comus was widely believed to have been an inspiration. ‘Goblin Market’ itself is meant to have inspired Alice’s Adventures Underground, whose author Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) regarded Rossetti’s tale as a work of genius. It is a telling compliment from the author of another surrealist masterpiece that also lends itself to a multitude of interpretations. The debate concerning Rossetti’s poem has continued since publication. Is it, as the Spectator believed in 1862, a genuine childhood poem, as Arthur Rackham’s enchanting 1933 illustrations would tend to confirm? Or, are the rather sinister later illustrations by George Gershinowitz and Martin Ware more truthful representations? Finally, and most controversially of all, do Kinuko Craft’s 1973 illustrations for Playboy have a validity beyond George Bataille’s concept of the phallic eye? The critic and poet Tom Paulin has ranked ‘Goblin Market’ alongside ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ as one of the greatest achievements of
Victorian poetry. He is right.
Sisterhood is the subject of another disturbing poem from Rossetti, ‘Sister Maude’, who ‘lurked to spy and peer’ and who, through jealousy, brings about the death of her sister’s lover and is then cursed in
a brutal last line: ‘But sister Maude, oh sister Maude, / Bide you with death and sin.’
The poem ‘“No, Thank You, John”’ shows Rossetti in a rare, very rare, cool and witty mood. There was, evidently, an unfortunate John, a marine painter, who was despatched with some contempt: ‘Here’s friendship for you if you like; but love, – / No, thank you, John.’
I have, alas, for decades miscontrued one of her best-known and best-loved poems: ‘When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me . . . I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; . . . Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget’ does not denote ‘happily’ – it means by chance, which rather alters the mood!
The mood in ‘Dost Thou Not Care?’ is not open to misinterpretation of any kind. It is a despairing love song to Christ, an anguished cry: ‘Dost Thou not love me, Lord, or care / For this mine ill?’ ‘Memory’ is one of the poems which most merits Larkin’s ‘steely stoicism’ insight. ‘I faced the truth alone . . . None know the choice I made and broke my heart . . . I have braced my will / Once, chosen for once my part . . . I broke it at a blow . . . laid it cold . . .’. Will is perhaps the operative word in this remarkable poem of emotional self-destruction in the cause of the soul. The first stanza of ‘Up-Hill’ was, as Betty S. Flowers tells us, spoken in a sermon by the then laypreacher in London, Vincent Van Gogh. Its last lines might have comforted that sad genius more: ‘Will there be beds for me and all who seek? / Yea, beds for all who come.’