"Come buy our orchard fruits…" : Some thoughts on "Goblin Market"

I am not a literary expert or critic, but I have been performing poetry, and using poetry in performance for 14 years. While today it's unusual to publicly perform poetry by someone else (in contrast to music, theatre and storytelling; where it's commonplace), I'd like to make a case for a piece I performed last night, and about twice previously - Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market".

Christina Rossetti was the sister of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder; artist, writer and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There's one of her poems that pretty much everyone knows, the Christmas Carol "In the Bleak Midwinter", but otherwise it's easy to dismiss the rest of her work as well-executed but worthy Christian poetry that's not terribly exciting. While I think that would still be doing her a disservice, there is one stand out piece in her œuvre which appears to have such a different character to her others.

"Goblin Market" was written (possibly) in 1859, and there is some debate as to whether or not it was a children's poem. The story wouldn't look out of place in a children's book, but the content, in parts, is laced with sexual suggestiveness. There is a sense of ambiguity about the piece - is it a metaphor for Jesus redeeming someone who has fallen to temptation (probably), does it refer (possibly) to temptation, rape and incest (maybe), could it even be about the perils of credit and shiny things which are not good for us in the long run (perhaps more suspect)…

In comparison to Rossetti's other works, the pace is relentless - the rhythms constantly change and sway, head off at a hundred miles and hour, suddenly stop and turn into something else - there is rapid-fire wordplay which must pre-date rap by over 100 years (the first minute of my performance tears through some 48 lines), there are tongue-twisters (lines like "Laura rose with Lizzie", where combinations of Ls and Rs and Ss and Cs seem to be arranged to deliberately catch out the reader), and there are 4 voiced characters in addition to the narrator (OK, one of them only gets 2 words). Some of this suggests to me that perhaps it is a children's poem, leading the reader into fluffing up their lines and raising a laugh or two, but from my perspective I consider it a real test of skill - at points the pace of the poem changes every couple of lines (something which isn't entirely obvious from the text unless you read it out loud) - in some ways the writing style is way ahead of its time, in that regard it's almost more of a story than a poem. The text begs to be unleashed from the page, setting free the bawling market traders, the fearful and excitable sisters, and the contrast between soft, tender lullaby as the sisters sleep and scenes with which may not be out of place in an action film. From my point of view as the performer on stage, it's a breathtaking roller-coaster ride.

(I've never travelled the whole length thus far - its 567 lines take me some 16 minutes to get through, and last night I read almost exactly half: 280 lines, taking just under 8 minutes)

Given the poem was written some 18 years before the invention of the phonograph, the first practical sound recording device, we obviously have no idea how it should have sounded, so why am I saying this? After a few readings of a text, you get the feel of the characters and the scenes, it starts to unfold in your mind's eye like a film. Once you've realised what's happening, the pace and voice becomes apparent - the text and form of a poem tell you what to do with it. What makes "Goblin Market" all the more remarkable for that is that, as far as I know, Christina didn't perform her work, although the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood organised poetry events (Christina appears to have had a turbulent relationship with the PRB, from publication in their magazine, "The Germ" and sitting for her brother's paintings to direct scathing attacks on them in some of her later work), but in my mind, it's so tempting to imagine this often sorrowful and reclusive woman standing in a room with the PRB, delivering "Goblin Market" with the pace and energy of a steam locomotive (for which, incidentally, the record at that time was some 80mph), but that probably never happened...