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Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
Christina Georgina Rossetti's book, 'Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems', is a collection of poetic works that explores themes of sisterhood, temptation, and redemption. Rossetti's poetic style is characterized by vivid imagery, intricate symbolism, and lyrical language that captivates the reader's imagination. The collection's literary context reflects the Victorian era's fascination with morality and the supernatural, making it a significant contribution to British poetry of the 19th century. 'Goblin Market', the centerpiece of the book, is a haunting narrative poem that follows two sisters' encounter with goblin merchants and their struggle against forbidden desires. Rossetti's complex exploration of female identity and sexuality is both timeless and groundbreaking. As a devout Christian and a prominent member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Rossetti's personal beliefs and experiences undoubtedly influenced her poetic work. Her unique perspective on gender, faith, and social norms adds depth and authenticity to 'Goblin Market' and other poems in the collection. I highly recommend 'Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems' to readers interested in Victorian poetry, feminist literature, and the intersection of spirituality and art.
255 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1866
83 people are currently reading
388 people want to read
About the author
Christina Rossetti
336 books560 followersChristina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).
Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.
Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.
All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.
After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
April 24, 2014
Special thanks to K.D. Absolutely for recommending "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, an allegorical poem dwelling on the dangers of sexual temptation and the power of a sister's love to bring about redemption.
While I enjoyed the poem in this free Kindle edition, I wish I had been able to find the edition of Goblin Market that K.D. read, an edition with beautiful illustrations by the author's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, both fellow pre-Raphaelites. How much more affecting the poem would have been!
While I enjoyed the poem in this free Kindle edition, I wish I had been able to find the edition of Goblin Market that K.D. read, an edition with beautiful illustrations by the author's brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, both fellow pre-Raphaelites. How much more affecting the poem would have been!
November 30, 2025
The "Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems" by Christina Rosetti had many surprises for me. A GR friend had recommended that I read the "Goblin Market" because of my declared interest in the origins of modern fantasy. The "Goblin Market" is by far the best of the over 130 poems in the anthology that I am reviewing. As there are many outstanding reviews of this poem on the GR site, I will say simply that I agree with the consensus opinion that the Goblin market is a classic both of fantasy and erotic literature.
The second best work in the volume is the "The Prince's Progress" which is a cautionary tale of failed love. Rossetti treats this them with skill in a fair number of pieces but nowhere else does she succeed quite as well.
Christina Rossetti was a fervent Christian and another substantial group of poems are described by the author as "Devotional". They range in quality from the sublime to the ridiculous. My Polish brother-in-law has long argued that English-language poets are severely handicapped by the fact that only 11 words in the English language rhyme with God. Rossetti certainly struggles hard with this dilemma. Take for example the closing lines of "Paradise: In a Symbol":
When they sing their best:
Not in any garden
That mortal foot have trod,
Not in any flowering tree
That springs from earthly sod,
But in the garden where they dwell,
The Paradise of God.
Reading the poems in this collection, one understands why Rossetti is not on the undergraduate curriculum in the 21st century. She is in places a rather heavy-handed rhymster. Worse, her values are in serious conflict with current values. In "Sit Down in the Lowest Room" Rossetti goes so far as to comment on her married sister with envy and to express regret at being an old spinster:
"She thrives, God's blessed husbandry;
She live a vine is full of fruit;
Her passion-flower climbs up toward heaven
Tho earth still binds its root.
While I sat alone and watched
My lot in life, to live alone,
In mine own world of interests,
Much felt but little shown."
Christine Rossetti had has an inventive mind, an ethereal spirit life and a sincere love of God. For the last 100 years her interests have been out of fashion. Nonetheless, she deserves a much larger audience than she currently has.
The second best work in the volume is the "The Prince's Progress" which is a cautionary tale of failed love. Rossetti treats this them with skill in a fair number of pieces but nowhere else does she succeed quite as well.
Christina Rossetti was a fervent Christian and another substantial group of poems are described by the author as "Devotional". They range in quality from the sublime to the ridiculous. My Polish brother-in-law has long argued that English-language poets are severely handicapped by the fact that only 11 words in the English language rhyme with God. Rossetti certainly struggles hard with this dilemma. Take for example the closing lines of "Paradise: In a Symbol":
When they sing their best:
Not in any garden
That mortal foot have trod,
Not in any flowering tree
That springs from earthly sod,
But in the garden where they dwell,
The Paradise of God.
Reading the poems in this collection, one understands why Rossetti is not on the undergraduate curriculum in the 21st century. She is in places a rather heavy-handed rhymster. Worse, her values are in serious conflict with current values. In "Sit Down in the Lowest Room" Rossetti goes so far as to comment on her married sister with envy and to express regret at being an old spinster:
"She thrives, God's blessed husbandry;
She live a vine is full of fruit;
Her passion-flower climbs up toward heaven
Tho earth still binds its root.
While I sat alone and watched
My lot in life, to live alone,
In mine own world of interests,
Much felt but little shown."
Christine Rossetti had has an inventive mind, an ethereal spirit life and a sincere love of God. For the last 100 years her interests have been out of fashion. Nonetheless, she deserves a much larger audience than she currently has.
December 17, 2015
This book was quite misleading. I went expecting poems along the lines of the goblin market, malicious faeries and whimsical settings galore. Instead I get mostly depressing tidbits on death and lack of love, all of it rife with seasonal imagery. Oh, also a wave of religion inspired writings at the end. Not a big fan of that kind of stuff. I definitely need to choose my next poetry reading more carefully.
November 24, 2021
The symbolism in this poem is incredible. The sexuality of women is so evident, yet hidden through the metaphor of fruits, also the contrast between sexual intercourse with men and women is depicted in quite an unusual way (positively). I was gladly shock by this poem and the amount of connection between other literary work (Pope's rape of the lock and the Bible)
March 6, 2014
I love Rossetti's poetry. Her work is raw, focused on the travails of women, their oppression by men in her time and before, and she develops strong women to counteract male influences. "Goblin Market" is by my favorite. The savior-sister as Christ/eucharist still awes me. Beautifully written.
May 24, 2023
An essential re-read of Goblin Market after visiting the Tate’s Rossetti exhibition. Still obscure, but a copious knowledge of fruits and fauna, and use of metaphors and similes.
August 17, 2025
Before I say anything else about this book: Goblin Market is a god-tier poem in my opinion. The language is so vivid and evocative, it flows so amazingly, it transports you to a whole other world.
There were some other stand-out poems to me in this collection: No, Thank You, John (Christina spoke only the truth!) and the one about the illegitimate daughter of a rich lady who then went to live with her but was never acknowledged. I thought that one was incredibly moving.
I also did like other poems throughout the collection, and really enjoyed the way language was used. But the majority of it, especially the Devotional Pieces, was a slog. I read the whole thing because poems I enjoyed kept popping up in between, but to be honest I wished I hadn't bothered with the second half or so of the book.
Still, I am glad to have come across the poems I especially enjoyed, which I likely wouldn't have if I hadn't read the whole thing.
There were some other stand-out poems to me in this collection: No, Thank You, John (Christina spoke only the truth!) and the one about the illegitimate daughter of a rich lady who then went to live with her but was never acknowledged. I thought that one was incredibly moving.
I also did like other poems throughout the collection, and really enjoyed the way language was used. But the majority of it, especially the Devotional Pieces, was a slog. I read the whole thing because poems I enjoyed kept popping up in between, but to be honest I wished I hadn't bothered with the second half or so of the book.
Still, I am glad to have come across the poems I especially enjoyed, which I likely wouldn't have if I hadn't read the whole thing.
April 22, 2020
I picked up this collection of poems by Rossetti only intending to read The Goblin Market after learning it was the inspiration for In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire. I really liked it so I decided to read the whole book even though I’m not a huge poetry fan. Four stars rounded up because the poems I liked were really good. The best ones are the title poems The Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress. Her nature poems are beautiful too.
January 3, 2025
los k no le han puesto 5 estrellas a este poemario no tienen ni idea de nada, christina rossetti no solo es LA poesía, sino también la mejooor poeta del mundo mundial la quiero la adoro y ella ll es tODO para mí <33 k tía más cristiana…
primera review del año sobre un poemario de una mujer?! performando hector bellerín k este año solo va a leer libros de mujeres supongo…. 🚬
primera review del año sobre un poemario de una mujer?! performando hector bellerín k este año solo va a leer libros de mujeres supongo…. 🚬
July 20, 2020
Goblin Market
Very good, I’d like the set of poems like this.
The poet writer created very thorough poems, that is awesome.
Very good, I’d like the set of poems like this.
The poet writer created very thorough poems, that is awesome.
May 25, 2021
A weak gathering of words
It seemed far too dated to read in today's way of thinking. Even some of poetry was weak and confusing.
It seemed far too dated to read in today's way of thinking. Even some of poetry was weak and confusing.
November 26, 2021
My first Christina Rossetti I read and I did so for my Poetry class. I really liked it!
July 26, 2023
The Goblin Market is just lovely.
Read
February 10, 2025DNF at pg 29
September 5, 2019
I'd never even heard of the Goblin Market until it was referred to on three or four different panels at the 2019 Worldcon. That made me curious, as I hadn't read any of Christina Rossetti's poems before.
The two named poems and Under the Rose are almost verse short stories, and there are a couple of other long poems. She also seems really fascinated with the seasons, sheep and lambs, and birds and their nests. I was less interested in the devotional poems, though, which were a bit mawkish.
I'd also say that a lot of the themes in this collection, especially the ones about nature, and those which intertwine love and loss and death, reminded me of Emily Dickinson.
The two named poems and Under the Rose are almost verse short stories, and there are a couple of other long poems. She also seems really fascinated with the seasons, sheep and lambs, and birds and their nests. I was less interested in the devotional poems, though, which were a bit mawkish.
I'd also say that a lot of the themes in this collection, especially the ones about nature, and those which intertwine love and loss and death, reminded me of Emily Dickinson.
June 25, 2018
I saw a tumblr post about April being poetry month, and I thought ‘I don’t read any poetry’, so, I added ‘read a poem’ to my daily list of things to do, and I started with this volume.
I’d read the Goblin Market years ago… Ah, the brave sister… determined to save the other, even from herself.
Who dumped Christina Rossetti? There’s a LOT of heartbreak and fickle men here. At least at the start, then she goes biblical about a quarter of the way in… *whispers* I think I prefer her heartbroken. Sorry, darling.
I do like the woodcut illustrated edition of The Prince’s Progress.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect...
[image error]

And then it’s back to feckless men who show up too late.
These things are always tricky to rate…
4 stars
I’d read the Goblin Market years ago… Ah, the brave sister… determined to save the other, even from herself.
Who dumped Christina Rossetti? There’s a LOT of heartbreak and fickle men here. At least at the start, then she goes biblical about a quarter of the way in… *whispers* I think I prefer her heartbroken. Sorry, darling.
I do like the woodcut illustrated edition of The Prince’s Progress.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect...
[image error]
Following the publication of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market in 1862, Dante Gabriel Rossetti helped launch his sister’s second volume of poetry. The Prince’s Progress tells of a princess awaiting the return of her tarrying prince. These illustrations allude to the beginning and the end of the tale. The title-page image shows a confined figure gazing out a window into an empty walled garden. The frontispiece shows the prince arriving, after a series of temptations and self-indulgences, only to find that the princess has died. After 1851 Rossetti stopped exhibiting at the Royal Academy, so his work was known to the public mostly through illustrations.

And then it’s back to feckless men who show up too late.
These things are always tricky to rate…
4 stars
November 12, 2014
Containing the two first books she published as well as several additional poem from collections and journals this book provides a great introduction to Rossetti.
She truly shines in her story poems they are the highlights of the book and two of the are the titles of the books "The Goblin Market" and "The Prince's Progress." She does a wonderful job using verse to tell the tales in a way that is engaging.
The collection also contains many love poems that are well written but still seem quite standard for the time period.
The most numerous type of poem is her religious poetry (some are also story poems). The imagery is varied and well considered, and the topics covered though seemingly common become quite esoteric and deep in their execution.
Over all 3 stars.
She truly shines in her story poems they are the highlights of the book and two of the are the titles of the books "The Goblin Market" and "The Prince's Progress." She does a wonderful job using verse to tell the tales in a way that is engaging.
The collection also contains many love poems that are well written but still seem quite standard for the time period.
The most numerous type of poem is her religious poetry (some are also story poems). The imagery is varied and well considered, and the topics covered though seemingly common become quite esoteric and deep in their execution.
Over all 3 stars.
March 10, 2014
The Goblin Market is one of the best story poems in the English language, akin to The Ancient Mariner and superior to The Lady of Shalotte. The poem is very lenient to all levels of interpretation and simple enjoyment, the rest of the collection is also superb and leaves the reader haunted and amazed.
April 24, 2014
I like the lyricism in all the poems, and the amazing words that she used to describe different things make everything so vivid! All these poems simply leaves you amazed and keeps you thinking for the whole week.
December 5, 2014
I could not find the exact edition of poetry that I read, which was The Goblin Market and Selected Poems. Here is my review of that:
http://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2014/...
http://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2014/...
March 16, 2021
Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti -- I love Christina Rossetti with my whole heart. She is the epitome of Victorian poetry in my opinion, so I hope you enjoy this too! Happy Reading!
March 6, 2016
Loved. Loved. Loved.
May 19, 2015
My very favorite poet. :')
November 22, 2015
One of my Favorite reads!
March 30, 2017
I love Goblin Market and her other poems are great as well. I probably shouldn't have read a whole book of poetry in one sitting though because it gets old fast.
April 11, 2017
Pretty hit or miss for me. Some poems are amazing, with interesting stories and beautiful imagery. Others are...just kind of weird and rambling and way too long.
March 1, 2018
I liked it
Some of the poems were very sad. Some of them were pretty entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them all. I'm glad I did.
Some of the poems were very sad. Some of them were pretty entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them all. I'm glad I did.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews