Rossetti Quotes

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
― Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems

“Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
'Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy”
― Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market: A Tale of Two Sisters

“Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot,
Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;
Lest you with me should shiver on the wold,
Athirst and hungering on a barren spot.
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer’s unreturning track.”
― Christina Rossetti

“When mysteries shall be revealed;
All secrets be unsealed;
When things of night, when things of shame,
Shall find at last a name…
~ Sooner or Later: Yet at Last”
― Christina Rossetti

“Oh foolishest fond folly of a heart
Divided, neither here nor there at rest!
That hankers after Heaven, but clings to earth
That neither here nor there knows thorough mirth,
Half-choosing, wholly missing, the good part: —
Oh fool among the foolish, in thy quest.
~ Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets”
― Christina Rossetti