THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

to project an ideal into the future, the latter being a particularly forceful vision of a world which has freed itself from
machines and from mechanical ways of thinking in order to release individual creativity.
The most distinguished of the poets associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement is Christina Rossetti (1830-94),
the younger sister of Dante Gabriel. Her earliest published poetry, in an escapist, dreamy sub-Tennysonian mode,
appeared in the first number of The Germ in 1850, but her distinctive female voice is clearly heard in her first major
collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). The title poem of the volume is an extraordinary achievement,
accumulative in its imagery, rhymed and half rhymed, at times languorous, at times aggressive, and always
rhythmically restless. At its climax, the redemptive Lizzie is assaulted by the far from whimsical goblins who attempt
to force her to eat their seductive fruit:
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Though the goblins cuffed her and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in:
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syrupped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
The poem has something of the strangeness of the work of Lewis Carroll, but its nasty ramifications and its implied
spiritual message stretch far beyond childhood and childish fears into the realm of sexual threat and female self
assertion. When Christina Rossetti wrote directly for children, as in her Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872),
she exhibits a direct simplicity which is equally distinct from the knowingness of ‘Goblin Market’ and from the
playful narrative inventiveness of Carroll. The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, which was published in 1866,
subtly develops the use of alliteration and assonance both in its title-poem, an allegory which describes the unhappy
uncertainty of emotional commitment, and in a sequence of lyric poems, secular and devotional. Further lyrics were
added to a new collected edition of poems in 1875 and the ambitious A Pageant and Other Poems, which contains the
religious sequence of Petrarchan sonnets ‘Monna Innominata’, appeared in 1881. Christina Rossetti’s devotional
poetry derives much from the powerful influence of Dante which was shared by all the younger members of her
Anglo-Italian family (her sister Maria is the author of the pioneer English analysis A Shadow of Dante (1872), and in
1861 Dante Gabriel Rossetti had published his study The Early Italian Poets, later revised as Dante and His Circle)
but her piety is also distinctly English. Her own intense Anglo-Catholicism readily responded to Anglican precedents,
most notably that of George Herbert whose influence is particularly evident in the question-and-answer ‘Up-Hill’ and
in the dialogue poem ‘A Bruised Reed shall He not Break’. In the shorter poems which deal with secular relationships
she explores emotional evasion and the failure of human sympathy as human alternatives to religious consolation and
heavenly consummation. A tentative eros may supplant agape, but eros appears to have offered no certainty and little
security in the past; the present and the future (even one which embraces death) seem to hold no more optimistic
prospect. These themes are variously investigated throughout her writing career, almost mockingly in ‘Promises Like
Pie-Crust’, elusively in ‘Winter My Secret’, ambiguously and mortally in the sonnet ‘Remember’. In the short and
even more ambiguous Song ‘When I am Dead my Dearest’ human love is treated with a take-it-or-leave-it quality
which serves to qualify its Keatsian metaphors and suggestions. Keats’s distant shadow also haunts ‘Autumn Violets’,
a poem which anxiously reverses the idea of autumnal fulfilment. Love in middle age, Rossetti implies, is as forced
and inappropriate as spring flowers (however sensuous) in autumn, the season when ‘A grateful Ruth’ should be
grateful for the ‘scanty corn’ that she gleans. This, however, seems to be a Ruth with no generous Boaz hovering at
the edge of the cornfield.
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