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Goblin market poem5/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Lizzie’s Christlike nature is emphasized by her instruction to Laura: “Eat me, drink me, love me.” This echoes Christ’s words to his disciples at the Last Supper, during which he told them to eat his body and drink his blood. ![]() Lizzie’s act of self-sacrifice also aligns her with Christ, who experienced the pain of crucifixion and death in order to save the world from sin. The recompense, if there is one, is joy, love, tenderness, and fear for subsequent generations of children, and the poem’s halfhappy ending is one which makes it possible to reimagine. Lizzie, aligned with Mary, saves her fallen sister, Laura, who is aligned with Eve. Goblin Market may be a children’s poem, but like everything the children hear, it is sung by the goblin men, the inevitable emblems of age and death. She also called it a children’s poem, and for her it probably was since, like her romantic antecedents, she saw childhood as a time of unparalleled intensity and experience. In light of the poem’s many biblical resonances, it is also possible to read this moment of mirroring as alluding to the traditional Christian belief that Mary was the second Eve who reversed the curses brought on humanity by the first Eve’s disobedience to God. Christina Rossetti claimed that Goblin Market was extemporized in a single day. This mirroring or replication of experiences, which might seem like a minor detail, is significant it suggests that Lizzie’s sacrifice will undo or reverse the damage caused to her sister by eating the fruit, bringing them back to the idyllic, peaceful lives they previously enjoyed. Lizzie’s mental daze mirrors Laura’s after meeting the goblins and eating their fruit for the first time. ![]()
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