Episode 294: “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, Part 1

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Literary Life Podcast

Episode 294: “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, Part 1
Hosts: Angelina Stanford & Thomas Banks
Date: September 16, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode marks the beginning of a two-part deep dive into Christina Rossetti’s famed narrative poem Goblin Market (1862). Experienced literary educators Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks set the stage with a rich exploration of Rossetti’s life, the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and the broader Victorian literary context. They emphasize the importance of reclaiming the lost intellectual traditions of the past, place Rossetti among her contemporaries, and discuss healthy and unhealthy ways to interpret classic poetry.
Theme: Recovering a deep, tradition-minded approach to reading—moving beyond surface interpretations to reclaim “the sheer joy of imagination.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Significance of Goblin Market and Why It Was Chosen

• Thomas on recommending the poem:

  "I really think she's an author that you would come to love if you read more of her." (03:16)

• The poem is positioned as essential reading for Angelina and, by extension, for listeners interested in the re-enchantment of literary experience.

2. Upcoming Educational Offerings & Mission

• Brief discussion about House of Humane Letters’ conference, webinars, and ongoing mission to revive humane letters, the traditional approach to the literary arts.
• Angelina on the podcast’s ethos:

  "We basically give classes for free...people tell me all the time I feel like I’m getting a free college class." (06:00)

3. The Pre-Raphaelite Background & Victorian Literary Climate

Rossetti’s Family and Artistic Circle

• Christina was raised in a wildly creative family, including her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other siblings with strong artistic leanings (24:08–24:42).
• The family’s Italian heritage and multilingual upbringing influenced her exposure to classical and medieval literature.
• Connection to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—a group revitalizing medieval motifs in defiance of the moralistic, didactic tendencies of Victorian England.

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement

• The Pre-Raphaelites, led in part by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, rebelled against the “overly didactic” art and literature of their time.
• Their work, including Christina’s poetry, returned to medieval, mythological, and biblical sources, seeking imagination, wonder, and symbolic depth over moralizing content.
• Notable for causing scandal with new subjects (e.g., sensuality, social issues) and forms of depiction considered improper by middle-class Victorian standards.

Literary and Religious Influences

• Christina Rossetti’s life: deeply religious, “so tender,” and at times considered joining a convent. Her devotion shaped her poetic voice and moral imagination (32:34–33:10).
• Daily reading of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Italian poets.
• Connection to John Keats, English Romantics, and—via her circle—to William Morris and George Meredith, both of whom expanded the sense of what narrative poetry and imaginative art could accomplish.

4. Victorian Attitudes Toward Literature

• Rapid rise of the novel as a popular form, even as opposition lingered:

  “It wasn’t quite decent yet...it’s still regarded as a little bit frivolous.” (34:49)

• Poetry’s role as a vehicle for storytelling peaked in the 19th century, before the modernist era’s shift to more esoteric verse.

5. The Form and Feel of Goblin Market

• Narrative poem, unusual for Rossetti (most of her work is brief and lyrical).
• Metrically loose but musical, mimicking the rhythm and soundscape of nursery rhymes.
• Language is chaste and pure, often resembling the diction of hymnody or children’s verse; “a calm surface that conceals deep waters.” (51:21–52:15)
• Powerful sense of “childlike innocence”—yet an undercurrent of “intangible violence.”
  Angelina:

  "There’s a childlike innocence here, which I think is connected to the whole concept of wonder." (52:30)
  Thomas:
  "There’s an innocence...almost a naivete. But there’s also this definite intangible violence." (52:57)

6. Literary Tradition and Resonance

• Goblin Market exemplifies the kind of intertextuality Northrop Frye describes:
  Angelina quoting Frye:

  "All themes and characters and stories that you encounter in literature belong to one big interlocking family." (22:45)

• The poem clearly echoes the biblical idea of forbidden fruit and the story of the Fall, positioning it as an allegory with multiple layers.
• Connection to George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (Rossetti’s work predates it; both moved in the same literary circles) (53:31–54:40).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

On Names and Personas:

• Angelina: “I wish you had a cool name like that.” (00:18)
• Thomas (dryly): “If I were named Dante Rossetti, I would probably be a much more interesting and charismatic person.” (01:39)

On Victorian Didacticism:

• Angelina (lampooning temperance-moralistic revisions):

  “This would be like a dentist rewrote Hansel and Gretel... and the witch comes out and says, ‘Aha! I’ve got you!’ and she hands them each a toothbrush. Be sure to brush.” (29:01)

On Literary Lineage and Tradition:

• Angelina (on intertextuality):

  “While I was reading Goblin Market, I was just writing in the margin: echo of this, echo of this—like every story that I felt, that resonance we talked about last week.” (22:45)

On Goblin Market’s Style:

• Thomas: “Her diction is very pure. She does not use any word which does not appear in the Book of Common Prayer.” (51:54)
• Angelina: “There’s a childlike innocence here, which I think is connected to the whole concept of wonder.” (52:30)

On Reading Poetry and Nature:

• Angelina: “Part of the reason we don’t know how to read poetry is that we don’t know nature.” (58:02)
• Thomas: “You can’t see an alder tree or an ilex tree... when you’re reading pastoral poetry, that becomes confusing quickly.” (58:09)

On Literary Interpretation:

• Angelina: “If you’re following the literary tradition, it’s very clear what this means... If you’re not, look at all of the ditches you can fall into.” (59:32)
• Thomas: “It’s actually kind of impressive how many ways people have contrived..." (59:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:18–03:40] – Warm-up and Personal Anecdotes: Why Goblin Market was chosen, personal resonance
• [04:10–12:06] – Updates on Literary Life events, mission, and upcoming conference/webinars
• [19:17–22:45] – Commonplace Quotes: “Peppery intolerance” and Northrop Frye on literary tradition
• [23:57–39:13] – Deep-Dive: Rossetti family, the Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian context, differences from neoclassicism
• [39:13–48:28] – Artistic Scandals, William Morris, and what’s “shocking” about Pre-Raphaelite art
• [48:28–55:32] – Poetry, Storytelling, and the Loss of Integration in Modern Times; Echoes between Rossetti and other writers
• [56:09–57:16] – Opening lines of Goblin Market read aloud
• [58:02–59:32] – Reading poetry, nature knowledge, first impressions, setting up next episode

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Conclusion & Teaser for Part Two

• This episode sets the groundwork for understanding Goblin Market in terms of its historical, literary, and imaginative context.
• Next episode will focus on “how to read this poem the right way,” what constitutes poor or anachronistic readings, and a line-by-line analysis.

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Bonus Poem [62:10]

The episode closes with Thomas Banks reading Christina Rossetti’s “A Green Cornfield.”

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Tone and Style

The hosts balance scholarly rigor with colloquial warmth and good humor—frequently poking fun at each other and their subject matter, while remaining deeply reverent toward the tradition of “reading well.” Their approach is inviting for both seasoned literature lovers and newcomers.

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For First-Time Listeners

This is a thorough, thoughtfully-layered conversation about poetry, tradition, and the powers of story. No need to have read Goblin Market (yet) to follow along! Next episode continues with a closer look at interpreting the poem in light of literary tradition.

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Notable Final Quote:

“Keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world.” (End)

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[A]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and here with me is a man who is not called Dante Rossetti or anything. Rosette. I wish you had a cool name like that.

[B]

I've sometimes thought, I mean, what's in a name? As Juliet asks. But I think probably quite a bit. And I think that if I would probably, I would probably be a much more interesting and charismatic person if I were named Dante Rossetti.

[A]

That's right. But it would also.

[B]

It's impossible not to be cool.

[A]

The name Dante Rossetti, that's a cool name. And it would also be false advertising though. You're. You're not a Dante, Rosette, you're a Thomas Banks.

[B]

Oh, yeah, I've learned to live with that.

[A]

I. I haven't.

[B]

You've learned to live with that. You've learned to endure the fact that I am not Dante Rossetti, but only I have a boring Anglo Saxon name.

[A]

We all have our crosses to bear and yes, that's mine. Welcome to the Literary Life podcast. If you're new here, we are two really lifelong English teachers. I feel like we've been doing this our whole life. And together we run the House of Hum. Humane Letters, a business which is devoted to recovering the lost introduction intellectual tradition of the Humane Letters. And this is our podcast where we basically give classes for free. Last week we did an episode on the literary tradition. And I know that not everybody listens to these episodes in order, but I record them in order. So you're gonna have to let me make connections for the fact that I'm moving chronologically through these podcast episodes, even if you're not. And so we're following up episode, which I will be referencing as we go with a couple of episodes on a Mr. Banks pick. You chose this. This is Christina Rossetti's narrative poem Goblin Market, which I had never read and you had been telling me that you thought it was me. It was written for me.

[B]

I know. I've been recommending this poem to you at least since, oh, I don't know, it was a few years ago. I gave a lecture on Christina Rossetti at one of our conferences. Going to say maybe 2022 or 2023. And I reread this poem then and a couple books about Christina Rossetti herself. And I really think she's an author that you would come to love if you read more of her.

[A]

Well, I've.

[B]

I. I think I can invoke the authority of Cindy here as well.

[A]

I think you can.

[B]

I'm going to argue that way.

[A]

I'm going to argue that the third Cindy would agree with missing member of the podcast is on sabbatical. No, it's true. And I've loved everything by Christina Rossetti that I have read, everything that you've sent me. I don't know why she's not more on my radar. But you had been telling me, even this morning when you came in the library and I was reading this poem, and you said, I think this was written for you. And I really felt like it was.

[B]

Yeah, I think I probably missed that line too often because I felt that about a number of books and poems and stories that, yeah, this could have been written for Angelina. I mean, almost as soon as I met you, I felt compelled to recommend E.M. forster short story the Celestial Omnibus, because I thought, like, this is not a story which I would recommend to just anyone, necessarily, because it is strange and odd and it's a very strange plot, and there's much going on there that is symbolic of a kind of, you know, of a kind of symbolism that I don't think strikes a chord with just anyone. But I was right. In your case.

[A]

You were right. In fact, the fact that you recommended that to me. And then on our second date, well, it was all the same weekend. So we met one day and we saw each other the next day when you actually found it in a bookstore and bought it for me. And then I wrote it on the plane ride home. I read it on the plane ride home, and when I read it, I thought, oh, this is a guy I could marry. Not Ian Forster. You. You.

[B]

Oh, thank you. Yeah.

[A]

No, because. I mean, because I felt like. No, you got me. And that story was exactly, exactly up my alley. Yeah. All right, well, before we start, one.

[B]

Of my great accomplishments. My head is swelling. My hat size has increased sevenfold from this conversation alone.

[A]

Oh. Before we bore our listeners to tears, you know, going down memory lane of our. Of our romance. We. We should get to business. So this podcast is 100% member supported. And thank you to our amazing Patreon for supporting this podcast for the fantastic community you guys have built. You just blow me away week after week with the things you say and, and the reading that you guys are doing together. And I'm just really proud of everything you guys are doing. So well done and thank you for supporting the podcast. The other way that we are able to allow this podcast to be a free resource for people. And people tell me all the time I feel like I'm getting a free college class. And I'd like to believe that that's true. One of the ways that we're able to do that is that we have a day job, a side gig to the podcast, where we teach classes online and we have a conference and we do webinars. So if you're interested in going deeper into some of the topics you've learned about in this podcast, or if you just would like to purchase some things from our. Our website to help keep us in business, we would appreciate that. But let me tell you some of the cool things that we've got going on. And we actually just launched this today on the day we're recording. We. I cannot believe I'm about to say this too. I just cannot believe how time has flown. But it is our 8th annual Literary Life Online conference. 8. I cannot believe it. And guys, we have a fantastic one for you this year now. We heard you. We heard you. We heard ourselves moaning and groaning, too, about, please don't put the conference during Lent anymore. It was just a. It was. It just ended up being the middle of the terrible land like you would expect. It was just the worst. It was the worst for us, the speakers. It was hard on you guys, the audience. So we heard you and we moved it. We radically moved it, which is why we are announcing it in September instead of in January like we usually do. So we are moving the conference to the end of January. So. Right. You know, you've. You've survived the Christmas rush and, you know, you haven't quite going into spring yet. So this is going to be the perfect boost right before you hit those February blues. Hopefully you'll, you know, warm up your. Your winter. And. And I'm really, really excited about the. The topic. It was inspired by a lot of things I had been reading and thinking about over the summer. And so we actually were able to put this together very, very quickly. So the theme is the letter killeth and the spirit quickeneth. Reading like a human. Now before I read to you the description, I just got to say I went with the old fashioned word quickeneth and I stand by that decision.

[B]

I think I rebuked you for that. Well, I, I'm tempted to, yeah, it.

[A]

Wasn'T, I don't think it met the, the criteria for a rebuke. But you did question like perhaps I wanted to go with a, an easier word. And I said, but the whole theme of the conference is that, you know, words matter and old words matter. And I'm going with it, I'm sticking by it.

[B]

Oh, I, I, I've, I've come to accept it. I've come to, I think it's a good title, a good title.

[A]

It's of course reference to the bible verse by St. Paul and of course it actually connects to a whole lot about St. Augustine which you'll find out about if you listen to my talk. The keynote speaker, that was a no brainer. As soon as I came up with the topic, I thought, all right, the person for this is Dr. Jason Baxter. We've had him on the podcast many times. He teaches with us. We've published his book at our publishing wing, Cassiodorus Press. And you should definitely go check out his book why Literature Still Matters. He also just did the audiobook for that. So we're really two awesome projects you should take check out. But I mean this is a guy who totally gets what it means to read like a human. So that was just a no brainer. And so we've secured him. He's going to be kicking us off January 23rd. So the conference is actually going to be longer this year. It's going to go January 23rd through 30th. So it'll be Dr. Baxter, I will be speaking, Mr. Banks will be speaking, our own Jen Rogers will be Speaking, our own Dr. Ann Phillips will be speaking. And then we are going to this year for the first time have a student panel to talk about what it has meant to them to learn how to read like a human. And I think that's going to be a real highlight is hearing, hearing the kids talk. But let me go ahead and read the in my best announcer voice read to you the description of this conference and see if this tickles your fancy. Our culture is obsessed with literacy. We track literacy statistics and data. Schools hire literacy coaches and specialists. Literature class has been replaced by literacy class. But has this obsession resulted in greater understanding of the written word. Quite the opposite. All around us is the evidence that we are existing in an almost post literate age. The popularity of AI tools to summarize reading into talking points for us is simply one small example of our inability to decipher the written word. We need machines to read for us because we can no longer read like humans. To understand how we got here, we have to cast our eyes to the other side of what C.S. lewis calls the great divide, the invisible curtain that separates us from the past. For the seeds of our current crisis were planted a long time ago, and the path of renewal starts in the same place. Looking back before the machine age, we can learn to recover a more human way to read and therefore to live. So again, that's going to be January 23rd through 30th. Of course, everything's recorded and we'll give the talks during the day and you can watch the recording at night. After you've put your kids to bed and, you know, propped your feet up, you can watch us in your jammies. It'll be amazing. So you can go to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out more about that and get the dates and the times. And register, please register. This is going to be fantastic. And we'll have a forum where we can discuss things as they come up in the conference. I'm really looking forward to that. Mr. Banks, thoughts about the conference?

[B]

Well, it's. I will admit that I have struggled to come up with a topic myself, but I have more or less settled on one which will involve. I'll just say it involves St. Paul and his use of the Old Testament. And that is. It'll challenge my abilities, I think.

[A]

Oh, I'm intrigued.

[B]

Well, I've never given a conference talk on a specifically scriptural.

[A]

You have not?

[B]

I've never, I've Never really taught St. Paul at all in, in my years at the House of Humane Letters. So, yes, we'll. We'll see what I can do with that.

[A]

Well, good. I'm looking forward to that. Just quickly. Don't worry, I won't make this the entire episode. One long infomercial for everything going on at the House of Humane Letters. Just quickly to tell you the other things we've got going on. If you want to peruse the website when you're there tomorrow, if you're listening to this on the day it drops tomorrow, Wednesday, September 17th, we've got. And I still, I'm pinching myself over this, we've got Dr. Michael Drought and he is going to be giving us a webinar called the Viking World. Old Norse Literature, Culture and influence. And guys, Dr. Drought is not only brilliant and incredibly knowledgeable, he is so entertaining. He is such a good speaker. I could listen to Dr. Drought read the phone book. Seriously. So that is going to be a fantastic time. If you're listening to this podcast and it's already aired, don't worry, pick up the recording and immerse yourself in a good time to learn about the Old Norse. And, you know, in terms of, like, what we do here on the podcast, you know, if you guys are fans of the Inklings, you know that the Old Norse was so essential to CS Lewis and Tolkien. They believed it was just the essential mythology for them. And I realized, you know, grab the smelling salts from my husband. But for them, it was even more essential than Greek. Greek mythology. So I'm really, really looking forward to what Dr. Drought has to tell us about the Vikings. We are also in the middle of Ella Hornstrass mini class, the Grammar of the Natural World, which is just fantastic. If that's meeting on Mondays in September, not too late to join us again. Everything's recorded. If you're at all interested in learning how nature is a book and you can learn to read it, you don't want to miss that mini class. And then we've also got some things that we have not yet launched. And we're going to give you guys a sneak peek. Mr. Banks, you're going to be doing a webinar in October. A little birdie told me. Why don't you give us a sneak peek of that?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, if we have any military history buffs or people who have an interest in post Reformation politics and civil conflicts, I'm going to be giving a talk on October 16, I think it is, on Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War, which actually is more than just the English Civil War. It's also fought in Scotland and Ireland. So it's increasingly called the Civil War of the Three Kingdoms by contemporary historians. But, yeah, Cromwell's career has been one that interested me for a long time. I will admit he's never been one of my heroes, but he is a fascinating creature of his time and just a very interesting man, that has to be said. I mean, he is a kind of a nobody. At the beginning of the war. He is a member for a very unimportant parliamentary constituency. It's like being a congressman from Nebraska or Idaho or something like that. And he becomes, within the space of a handful of years, commander of England's army. And then, through strange concatenation of circumstances, Lord Protectorate, Basically a military dictator who is responsible for the execution of King Charles the First. Yeah, so he's, he is a unexampled character in English history. I think there's never really been anyone quite like him. And he's also wildly admired and wildly despised. He's a very controversial and polarizing figure. I don't like those adjectives because it seems like every historical figure in some ways controversial or polarizing, but it's certainly true of him.

[A]

Well, it's a very important topic, and I realize I'm your wife, but, guys, you can trust me when this is my real opinion of his teaching ability, because as I always tell the students, I'll marry you, and I'm going to stay married to you forever, but I will fire you.

[B]

Okay, no pressure there.

[A]

Yeah, no pressure. So the students know, like, you know, you have to bring your A game. And, and really, you're such a gifted. You really are so good at giving these history webinars. You just make these guys come alive. And I've noticed this, but I've also heard other people talk about it, that when you give a history webinar, it's like you're just, you know, just sharing anecdotes with, you know, oh, you know, here's Oliver, you know, down at the pub, and I ran into, you know, Milton at the post office, and we had this kind of funny exchange. And, you know, you, you really, they come to life. They really, they really do. And so, yeah, this would be appropriate for high school students as well as adults. So if you're, you know, homeschooling and you would like to kind of beef up some sections of your history curriculum, this would be, this would be a great opportunity to fill out that, you know, the, the English Civil War and the Restoration time period, it's, it's very significant. So well done. Now here's a sneak peek of what I've got. Coming up in October, I am going to attempt to redeem Edgar Allan Poe. I am going to grab, I was going to say grab the bull by the hearts. I'm going to grab the pendulum by the horns. And I, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go full at it. This idea that Edgar Allan Poe is the Stephen King of his day and he's just trying to shock you, or are he some kind of anarchist? Or that he's got some kind of, you know, ungodly perspective of reality could not be further from the truth. He has been grossly misunderstood. I've been reading his non fiction writing. I've been. I have really jumped into the deep end here with Edgar Allan Poe. And I gotta tell you, the water is very nice. It. It's not scary. That's not what he's doing. In fact, I'm going to argue that Edgar Allan Poe is the greatest American defender of the medieval imagination that we have. And he has been deeply misunderstood, deeply maligned and. Yeah. So join me in November as I give you a different perspective on Edgar Allan Poe. And I think your mind's going to be blown. I think you're going to realize there's a whole lot more going on than we have given credit.

[B]

He's. I mean, everyone knows that he's a strange author. There's an otherworldliness there. He's also just stylistically very strange, given the other American writers who loom large in that particular moment. I mean, if you, if you read Poe and then you read Emerson or Thoreau, who are his contemporaries, I mean, it's worlds apart.

[A]

Yeah. He wasn't a big fan of the Transcendentalists. He called them the Frog Pondians.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which I think is hilarious.

[B]

Basically, if you're from New England and you live in the 1840s, 1850s, Poe was not a fan of yours.

[A]

I'm also not a fan of the Transcendentalist. So team POE. Team Poe, 100%. And yeah. So sign up for my webinar when we launch it and you'll find out why we none of us should be team Transcendentalists. All right, well, that's what we've got going on and what we've got coming up. I think we're going to end this year very strong with these webinars. I mean, honestly, it is. I just pinch myself. I cannot believe the quality of things that we're able to offer. And I, I think we really are making headway in our, in our mission to help to recover this lost intellectual tradition. It's just been an amazing experience to see so many people become enlivened during this recovery. All right, well, now is the time for the podcast where we share our commonplace quotes. Mr. Banks, you got one for us?

[B]

Yeah. You know, one of the several history books I've been consulting about the Cromwellian period. It's called England's Precedence by the historian William McElwee. And here describing the. The Anglican archbishop William Laud, he says, quote, he had the peppery intolerance that is so often found in small men. Oh, that's just a perfect sentence right there. I loved that fire. Yeah. It actually sounded like something you would say.

[A]

Am I ever that you never.

[B]

I mean, you've never said that about anyone we know, at least as far as I can remember. But it sounds like something you would say.

[A]

All right, say it again. Let me see if I can hear it in my voice.

[B]

He had the peppery intolerance that is so often found in spirit small men.

[A]

See, that is an Angelina sentiment, but that is a Thomas Manx sentence.

[B]

Okay, that's fair. Yeah. The diction maybe is more Banksian. And laud, by the way. So he was Archbishop of Canterbury, very significant figure in the years leading up to the English Civil War. And he was. He was very short. I think he was barely five feet tall. Of course, he added to that with the great, you know, bishop's miter.

[A]

That explains that particular fashion statement.

[B]

Yeah. And the Puritans had a brilliant joke about laud. He was not friends with the Puritans. There was no love lost between them. Give praise to God and little laud to the devil, if you think about Lord and like all glory, laud and honor.

[A]

So, yeah, I hear the pun. Very nice. Very nice. Okay, well, my commonplace quote is going to be a bit of a throwback to last week's episode on the literary tradition, which really. I really think that needs to be kind of people's first stop if you're brand new to the podcast. Because I lay out there. We lay out there. What it is is exactly that we're trying to recover when we say the lost intellectual tradition, and we talk about how that affects the way we read. And I did not know this going into it because I had never read Goblin Market before. And when we made the schedule, I, you know, I just arranged it kind of randomly. I guess we could say it was divinely ordered. But as I sat down to read this poem this morning, it struck me how it was such a great illustration of everything we talked about in the literary tradition episode that as I was reading it, I thought, oh, I know exactly what the bad ways of reading would be for this, and we'll talk about that as we go, and why we don't think it's right in the midst of the obvious transcendent meaning in here, we're gonna. We're gonna smudge the window. To go back to my. My metaphor of last week with these. With these terrible readings. So the quote I have is a quote that fits with what we talked about last week about that. When you approach a work of literature. It is not a closed system. It's not just you in this text, but this text exists in a coherent, unified world of literature. So I've got a Northrop Fi kind of pithy quote about that, and I'm going to give credit to Esther Bills, hhl, student, graduate of the House of Humane Letters Literary Fellowship program. So shout out to her. Esther is so devoted. Every Friday in our Facebook group, she posts hashtag Friday F R Y E. So hashtag Friday. And she always makes a graphic and a quote from a Northrop Fry book. And so even though I have read the Educated Imagination probably five times, maybe even more, at least five times, I'm going to give her credit because she made a graphic of this quote. And when I saw it this morning, I thought, I'm going to use that for my podcast. Commonplace Quote. So this is from Northrop Fries. Very short, very good. I mean, amazing. Perfect place to start volumes. The Educated Imagination. You can also find this him as a series of radio lectures he gave on the Internet. But here's the. Here's the sentence. All themes and characters and stories that you encounter in literature belong to one big interlocking family. Here, here, here, here. And really, while I was reading Goblin Market, I was just writing in the margin echo of this. Echo of this. Like every story that I felt, that resonance that we talked about last week. Yeah, it's fantastic. So it's not a very long poem. We have two episodes devoted to it. And I thought, since this is Mr. Banks pick, he could introduce us and me to the world of Christina Rossetti and we'll get a little bit into the poem and then we'll finish it next time. So, Mr. Banks, take it away. Tell us about Christina Rossetti. Tell us about Victorian poetry. Put this into the larger imaginative context that we need.

[B]

So Christina Rossetti, the first thing about her is she's born into a family of artists of whom two, herself being one, become quite famous the other.

[A]

It was her brother as Dante.

[B]

Her brother is Dante Rossetti? Yeah, Dante Rossetti. And they are the children of a eccentric Italian immigrant, political firebrand and Dante scholar. He was evidently not a very good Dante scholar, but a very, very enthusiastic one, I think he seemed.

[A]

Wasn't she Beatrice Ros. Why weren't they Dante and Beatrice Rossetti?

[B]

I don't know. I don't know. But so, yeah. And all the members of the family were creative in some way or other. The brother, another brother, William Rossetti, he painted a bit. Not as well as Dante, but he was A member of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, he also became the biographer of his brother and sister, and he was a literary editor. So these are bookish people, and the children are all encouraged to. To kind of pursue their fantasies when they are going through their, you know, mostly informal schooling. Christina is. It's kind of interesting. I mean, Christina, if you read about her upbringing, it has both some of the charm and some of the limitations of, you know, a Victorian female female education. She is a lifelong reader of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare, Spenser, English poetry, and also Italian, medieval and Renaissance poetry. The children, I think all were bilingual, and she can quote, you know, if you look at some of the epigraphs of her poems, they're drawn quite freely from Tasso and Dante and Petrarch and Ariosto and others. So she is. She is a lifelong writer and begins to publish kind of in the shadow of her brother, Dante Rossetti, who becomes something of a sensation both in paint and in print, when the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which he is kind of the leading member, are commissioned to paint, I think, the Oxford Union Buildings and some other very public sorts of exhibitions. And they also catch the eye of the. I was going to say leading art critic, but he's so much more than that. They catch the eye of John Ruskin. John Ruskin was an advocate of their particular style of composition. And the Pre Raphaelites were kind of edgy and dangerous and offended a lot of people. Charles Dickens denounced some of their sacred art, some of their paintings. One in particular by, I think it was William Holman, Hunt of the Holy Family. It's a domestic scene featuring St. Joseph and St. Mary and the Infant Christ. And Dickens thought this particular painting was irreverent because it looked, I don't know, to his eye. It was too gritty and irreverent a treatment of something that ought to be sacrosanct. So Ruskin is defending a group of artists who are breaking with some established modes and styles of composition that you would learn in the respectable artistic academies of the day.

[A]

All right, let me pause there and.

[B]

Pick up a. Yeah, I've sort of thrown. I'm sort of throwing, you know, buckets of paint at the canvas here.

[A]

It's awesome, though. But so if you are listening in order, and you did listen to last week's podcast on the literary tradition, one of the things I said was, you know, this is the thread we're following. And I said, we're following from Aristotle's Poetics, you know, through the medieval Allegorists and you know, Augustine and Spencer and Shakespeare and Coleridge. And you know, as I traced that line and I said Coleridge and then I think I jumped to the inklings. But if that's a big gap. So if we wanted to fill that in, we could go Coleridge, McDonald, Ruskin and the Pre Raphaelites. So this thread we're talking about, this imaginative thread that we're. That values the. The. And upholds the. The imagination as a meaning apprehending faculty that goes through the Pre Raphaelites and, and through Ruskin. And so one of the things that you see with them is in. And you guys have heard us talk about this before, specifically in the series we did on Charles Dickens Hard Times that Victorian England, and especially in the art is heavily didactic. Like super didactic. Like, go read Charles Dickens, the Fraud of the Fairies. He gets very upse. How didactic? Everything, everything's a Sunday school lesson. Everything's beat you over the head. I, you know, they're rewriting fairy tales to make them temperance tracks. Just like really over the head.

[B]

Literally, literally, literally.

[A]

That Charles Dickens was very upset about that. I, I always give the example in my classes to my students. Like this would be like if somebody, you know, if a dentist rewrote Hansel and Gretel and then, you know, they're, they're eating the, the gingerbread house and the witch comes out and says, aha, I've got you. And she hands them each a toothbrush. Be sure to brush because you. That's. That's what they were doing. Just totally sucked out the imagination, sucked out the wonder of everything and, and just beat everybody over the head with these moral essence. Charles Dickens is somebody who, his entire career is a push back on that. And so are the Pre Raphaelites, and so is Christina Rosetti big time.

[B]

And I should say that like even, even a lot of the authors and critics and you mentioned Dickens, who I think were able to diagnose this particular malaise that you see in so much of Victorian writing. I think kind of suffered from it themselves.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

It's kind of strange. So like the air of it.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah, I know. It's kind of like you're living in this, well, miasma, for lack of another word. And you might realize it and resent it. But also, I mean, you know, the publishing industry has certain types of books, certain types of novels, story collections that it likes to give the public. The public, you know, does the paying and yeah, like just a certain vein of moralism. You can find in most major authors of the time.

[A]

And it's. So it's true of our own time too. Even. Even people who are very much vocally engaged and, you know, getting back to the old ways are still completely mired in their modernity and they can't see it. Like, you know, somewhat of that is just going to be inescapable. And yeah, Dickens is a great example because I love Dickens and I see in Dickens work a real attempt to inject a sense of wonder in the imagination back into literature. But you're right, there are times when he definitely veers off into the didactic. Like he just can't. He can't escape it. So the Pre Raphaelites, sometimes he enjoys.

[B]

Addressing the reader directly and, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah.

[A]

Hey, hey, you. I'm talking to you. Sense of wonder. I said wonder. But this would help to explain a lot of the subject matter of the Pre Raphaelites. So you see a lot of Shakespeare scenes, a lot of mythological scenes. They are. Well, you know, they're very much promoting this older medieval sensibility and not the neoclassical view of art. So they're kind of connected to the Romantics in that sense that they're trying to get back to this medieval imagination, whereas the Neoclassicals tended to be much more devotees of reason with a capital R. Yeah. So that line that we were tracing last week, it goes right through the Rossettis. So Christina Rossetti is quite in line with that. And then we'll see that in the poem she wrote.

[B]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And Rossetti also, both she and her brother owe a lot to John Keats. John Keats is one of the leading Romantic poets in England in the generation prior to them. And another, I mean, so obvious that, you know, it maybe isn't obvious. Influence that you see in Christina Rossetti's poems is the King James Bible, which is a book she read every day. New, backwards and forward. Yeah. And she was. And this was not true of all the Pre Raphaelites. Some of them are very bohemian and wild. But Christina Rossetti was the kind of woman who did not play board games because she thought it unchristian to win.

[A]

Oh, bless her, she's so tender. She was such a tender.

[B]

She seriously considered becoming a nun. I believe one of her sisters did become an Anglican nun or an Anglican tertiary or something like that.

[A]

When you understand her incredibly sensitive conscious. Her. Her. She refused to. She turned down marriage proposals because, you know, she.

[B]

For religious reasons. Yes. I think. I think a Catholic. One of the young men who proposed her was A Catholic. And she, she. If she was going to marry, she only going to marry someone from her own church. And they were all Church of England people.

[A]

Right. So she's just this incredibly devout person. And when we start looking at some of the bad ways that this particular poem is read, it just flies in the face of her entire life that there's just no way Christina Rossetti would be writing the things that people think she's writing.

[B]

Yeah, that would probably be horrifying to her.

[A]

It would be horrifying to her.

[B]

This is the kind of woman who does not read. Read novels on Sunday.

[A]

Right.

[B]

By the way, that was actually very common, I found in not even like really rigid and pharisaical Victorian families, but even comparatively easygoing ones that was just something you didn't do. Is like reading novels on Sunday was not a proper recreation. Imagine that. I will, of course, if I see you reading a Corman strike, put it away.

[A]

Well, you know, we explored this. This line of thinking in our series that we did on North Abbey, because Jane Austen is very much trying to argue that the novel is a legitimate art form and it's not just a sensationalist or sentimental kind of passing of the time.

[B]

By the time you get into the Victorian period, a generation or so after Jane Austen, I mean, the novel has overtaken all forms of poetry as the most. The most popular form of literary in.

[A]

The Victorian period is like drama in the Elizabeth.

[B]

No, everyone reads novels. Everyone. The novel is coming into its own as an art form, really. I think the great age of the novel, both in English and several other branches of European literature, is probably from about, I don't know, 1800-1925. Someone can prove me wrong on that, But I think that's a kind of the great age of it.

[A]

Let's back you up just a little bit. Oh, no, you finish your sentence.

[B]

But I was gonna say it wasn't quite. Maybe it wasn't quite decent yet. I mean, everyone reads these things, but at the same time, it's still kind of regarded as a little bit frivolous. Yeah. Not. Not on a level with the higher forms of drama, say, or with an epic of the kind that Milton wrote, even though no one is really writing at least important epics anymore in the 19th century. That form has kind of had its day. Yeah.

[A]

I just wanted to back you up so we could define some terms and get some dates out there, because not everybody listening to the podcast is going to the Victorian period and when are the Pre Raphaelites. So why don't you give us the dates for what is Victorian England, and then put the Rosetti.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah. So Victorian England, I mean, is the England over which Victoria Reigns for 64 years, 1837-1901. And she reigned so long because she was quite young when she came to the throne. She was only, what, 18 or 19 herself. And Christina Rossetti is born. Actually, her life pretty much corresponds to this period almost exactly. She's born in 1832, dies in 1894.

[A]

And this is written in 1862.

[B]

1862, yeah. Yeah.

[A]

So she's 30 years old when she writes. 29.

[B]

30, yes. And, yeah, it took her a while to publish. I mean, but she had been. I think she had been writing verse from her teens onward, and.

[A]

And.

[B]

She was. I kind of get the impression that she had a, you know, some close links to her brother's artistic circle. You know, the pre Raphaelites called themselves brothers. I mean, not all of them were biological brothers. There was William and Michael Rossetti.

[A]

Very medieval saying, but, yeah, it's like a guild.

[B]

It's like a guild. They actually issued a manifesto as well in a literary magazine, which they unfortunately titled the Germ, which I think folded after about three issues.

[A]

So they're trying to say it's like.

[B]

It's like the seed. That's what they meant. But it's like. Yeah, that doesn't sound very. It's like. It's like a medical journal, maybe. Anyway, so all of them, like I said, Swinburn, Rossetti, some of the others, were kind of bohemian and a little bit dangerous. And I kind of get the impression that Christina Rossetti was maybe almost a sort of sanitizing influence on the group that she was. She was sort of an honorary member of. But, you know, she's. She's the little sister of Dr. Rossetti.

[A]

There's them all cleaning up and sitting up straight. Yeah, into the room.

[B]

Yeah, it was. And, like, if you read about Dante Rossetti and a couple of the other men kept rooms together before they got married, so they were, you know, roommates and kind of lived. If you think that men have only begun to live like slobs in college, you know, in the last 50 years or something. Dante Rossetti kept a menagerie. He liked to collect, like, exotic animals, and he had. He kept wombats as indoor pets.

[A]

She mentions the wombat.

[B]

Yeah. That might actually have been inspired by her brother's. I don't actually know that for a fact, but maybe it was. So. And wombats, by the way, if you Think that they're like that adorable marsupial that, you know, you just want to pick up and cuddle. They're totally destructive and they will destroy your house if you let them in. I don't know this from experience, but I have actually done some reading about this that a lot of people think wombats would be great pets and it turns out badly.

[A]

Okay, so we're gonna have an official rule, no wombats in our house.

[B]

So. Yeah, it was, it was like Dante Rossetti and Swinburne and George Meredith when they were living together. It was like the mad Tea party combined with a bachelor party.

[A]

I realized. George Meredith lived with Dante Rossetti.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, George Meredith. He actually modeled for him. He was a. He was George Meredith, by the way, when he was a young man was considered very good looking author.

[A]

George Marriott. He married, if you ever. He was a model.

[B]

He was an artist model. And I, I think several of the. Of the Pre Raphaelite paintings.

[A]

No idea.

[B]

There's one, the Death of Chatterton, I can't remember if that is the Death of Chatterton. I think is either John Everett Millais or William Holman Hunt. It's one of the two. But that was George Meredith who modeled for that. Keep talking.

[A]

Yeah, I had no idea about that. I love the Pre Raphaelites. I mean, I don't necessarily want to invite them into my home with their wombats, but I love their paintings. I mean we have several Waterhouse paintings and oh, I always forget Jones is right here over my, my shoulder. And if you've ever taken a class with me, you've seen my Edward Burn.

[B]

Jo, I was wrong. It was the Pre Raphaelite painter Henry Wallace. The Death of Chatterton. But if you look up the Death of Chatterton painting, that's George Merri. Yeah. And I would bet Ms. Stanford, you have seen it because this is in the Tate in Britain, which I know you've been to the Tate. I have, yeah.

[A]

I had no idea that ginger boy was George Meredith.

[B]

George Meredith also. Again, this shows that the Pre Raphaelites and the literary figures adjacent to them, they are, they're not total anarchists or anything, but they are kind of pushing the envelope of what you can do not just in a painting but in other artistic media as well. And George Meredith wrote a long sequence of lyric poems called Modern Love, which is about the breakdown of a marriage that ends in divorce. Oh, that was very. And again, that was something. It's really divorced because of incompatible temperaments. And he actually, his wife, I believe in real life, left him for his best friend. So he, he knew about these things. And it's. It's a very grim and kind of demoralizing poem to read, but it is. Some of his lyrics really have a kind of. A kind of severe beauty about them. Nonetheless, though, writing sonnet sequences about divorce in mid Victorian England is. That's not something necessarily to endear you either to critics or to middle class opinion.

[A]

Not at all.

[B]

Yeah, like, we don't think of. We look at the Vic. I mean, it's so hard to think ourselves back into the frame of mind that first encountered these things. But some of the pre Raphaelite paintings, like the Awakening Conscience, which is a William Holman Hunt, which shows a kept woman who's about to leave the man she lives with but is not married to, like very. It looks to us like a very proper domestic setting. A woman who's, you know, wearing, you know, one of those big bustley second Empire dresses and a man with, you know, long Victorian sideburns, and they're sitting at a piano together and she's rising up and looks like she's looking sort of heavenward. That to them, that was considered, I'm gonna say, quasi pornographic, semi pornographic, because it's, you know, it acknowledges that sometimes men and women live together without having tied the knot sacramentally.

[A]

That would have more than raised some eyebrows. And I'd grab the smelling salts for that. Well, it's the same thing with the flowing hair. So pre Raphaelite paintings have a lot of flowing. Oh, you think like the lady of Shalott. So you got your King Arthur, your King Arthur medieval setting there. But you've got, you know, she's got the long flowing hair. You've got the loose, flowing hair with all the different versions of Ophelia that they've painted. Lots of Shakespeare stuff. And that was scandalous because only prostitutes wore their hair loose. That was a way that it was signaled if you were walking around. So for these models to be having their hair down.

[B]

So if you just have naturally long hair, that would be seen as.

[A]

Yeah, wrong.

[B]

Kind of 80.

[A]

Wears her hair up, doesn't advertise her wares.

[B]

You know, another figure, I should have mentioned him before, but he's mixed up in all this too fundamentally, is William Morris. Yeah, William Morris and William Morris. Honestly, I think, I think the greatest of all the names we've mentioned today, I mean, he does. Is there anything he doesn't do well?

[A]

Poetry, King Arthur, Norse mythology.

[B]

I mean, he's an architect. He designs his own wallpaper. He ran a Printing press, the Kelmscott Printing Press. He writes a wide variety of books. I mean, he writes romances which actually kind of feel like medieval romances, like they might have been written by Chretien de Troy or someone like that.

[A]

And William Morris's medieval romances that he wrote were huge, huge, huge influence on CS Lewis. He fell in love with the Middle Ages of William Morris.

[B]

His poetry, too, like the Earthly paradise and novels.

[A]

The wood between the Worlds. Well, at the End of the World.

[B]

He translated the Odyssey and the Aeneid into rhyming English verse. I mean, yeah, he just, he does, he does everything. William Morris, like that's. He's another one of those characters who just, you know, I don't want to go back to Victorian England and live there, but sometimes when I think of a figure like that, I ask myself, how could this person exist again? And I just think that you can't have another William Morris. He was also a politically active socialist, which is so strange when you read his books, which are like pure escapism, you would think this is a man with no politics at all. But he was actually a early sort of Fabian socialist.

[A]

So we should say, though, it's not the socialism of today.

[B]

Yeah, he wasn't a Marxist, but it's.

[A]

Much more like they were concerned about child labor and, you know, hey, we've got these factories and we got 5 year olds.

[B]

Abuses of industrial capitalism, that kind of thing.

[A]

Which, like, I know sometimes people will read biographies or something and then, because I'll see it on Facebook and they'll be like, wait. I mean, honestly, like most conservatives have accepted what it was that William Morris and Beatrix Potterwood is upset about. Anyway, that's why we have child labor laws in this country that, you know, maybe five year olds shouldn't work in mines and five year olds shouldn't work in factories and you know, that kind of stuff. So, yeah, they're not, not. They're not leftists, but they are somebody who, who has a concern for the.

[B]

Poor or leftist, but not. But not like materialistic leftists of the Marxist variety.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Anyway, that's a different story for.

[A]

Yeah, and I'm just trying to put it into context. I know somebody, you know, that's a trigger word. They were socialists. Like not like 2025. No, more like 1825.

[B]

You can read, you know, you can read leftists, you can read socialists and enjoy them. You can read all sorts of people with odd political ideas and enjoy them. I do, all the time.

[A]

Indeed you can. Absolutely. All Right, well, tell us a bit more about Christina Rossetti. When this came out, had she already published her more well known, smaller works of poetry?

[B]

This was not the first poem to appear in her name, I believe. I think it's one of the first ones that really gets much attention, however.

[A]

Oh, does it put her on the metal?

[B]

I think from the first time it appears. I mean, people realize that, yeah, we have a new lyric talent here amongst our poets, but, like, they don't really know what to do. And I think even today, we don't really know what to do with this poem. It's not really complicated on the face level, but there's something kind of elusive about it. Exactly what the symbols are meant to evoke.

[A]

Now, is this the only, like, longer piece she ever wrote?

[B]

It's one of her longest poems. Yeah. Most of her poems she used the sonnet form, in short, lyric form. But you would be hard pressed to put together any great list of any long list of Christina Rossetti poems that are more than, say, 30 lines long. So, yeah, really, the short lyric flight is where she's, I think, at her most comfortable. And this is in some ways kind of an unusual poem.

[A]

Well, it is, because it's a narrative poem, first of all. It's telling a story.

[B]

Yeah. And by the way, this is. She belongs to not the last, but almost the last generation where poetry is an appropriate medium for telling a story.

[A]

Yeah. It makes me think of Aurora League.

[B]

William Morris, like most of William Morris's major poems, are narrative poems. Yeah. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson has some verse narratives, you know, Idylls of the King and Browning does. But yeah, after then, by the time you get into modernism proper, T.S. eliot and Ezra Pound and W.H. auden and, you know, William Butler Yeats, like poetry is a vehicle for story. Those things have sort of been separated. And I think that's not. I don't think that's altogether a healthy thing. I think that's kind of limiting. One of the reasons why poems, Poetry becomes very much a craft practiced and enjoyed by the few rather than the many. It kind of ceases to be a popular art. That's. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why that is.

[A]

So if you go all the way back to storytelling, at the very beginning, they told a story in poetic verse and they sung it. So those three things went storytelling, poetry and song. And then over time, we see those three things separate. And I don't think that's been good for any of those three.

[B]

It's amazing. Also when you consider that almost every national literature, almost every culture's literature begins with poetry, and prose comes later, whether fiction or non fiction. I mean, Homer.

[A]

Arthur Fry makes the same point. He says that poetry is our natural language. That's a natural sing song language of children. Prose is the unnatural language that comes later.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, to just go to the Greeks, Homer's poems are composed probably between 800 and 700 BC. And the first major prose writer in Greek, whose, whose writings have survived to us is Herodotus, who comes about 400 years later, almost 400 years later, 300 and some years later. And that is not a singularity. That tends to be the rule. Same is true of Latin, most of the medieval languages, the Romance languages, and English also. I mean, Beowulf is, you know, you have Beowulf before you have. I don't know. Who would our first major prose writer be? I don't even know. Daniel Defoe, like I was gonna say like Thomas Mallory maybe, but someone like that. Yeah, versus just. Versus just the first literary vehicle with which creative writers, you know, naturally select for their purposes. We sing before we, you know, I don't know, it's almost like we run before we walk.

[A]

Well, that's a good way to say that. And you know, Fry, to your point earlier about how, you know, poetry, since we have separated from story, has become something read by the few. He makes the point that since poetry has separated from story, poetry has become a specialized thing that is written by poets for other poets. That's how special.

[B]

Yeah, no, that's. It's depressing, but that's also true. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, just. Personally, I think that those three arts long to be reunited, and I'm quite curious what the, what the future would hold. I mean, I honestly think part of the reason for the smash success of Hamilton is because it was an attempt to reunite those three things.

[B]

I've never heard that before.

[A]

No, that's my own theory.

[B]

There's something to that.

[A]

I think there's something to that. Thank you. Thank you. All right, well, anything else? Well, okay. Well, what's the form? When I first am encountering something I've never read before, my first question is always, what kind of story am I reading? So what's the form here?

[B]

So this poem is metrically somewhat looser than most of her poetry. You'll notice that the lines are. Any given line in this poem is short, but it sort of goes back and forth between lines with two stresses in them and lines with three stresses. So it's kind Of a loose meter that she's using to tell her story here. It's very musical, like everything she wrote.

[A]

Nursery rhyme.

[B]

A number of her poems, by the way, have been set to music towards the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th. And I think they naturally kind of invite that. Some of her poems, if you read them on the page, kind of read like hymns. And she may have had in mind. I don't know if she intended them to be, you know, composed as hymns, but. Oh, what's the famous one? I know we've referred to it before. Birthday in the bleak midwinter.

[A]

Oh, in the bleak Midwest.

[B]

Yeah, that's when we still sing. Yeah, that's when we still sing and everything. Another thing about Christina Rossetti, if you read any biography or critical interpretation of her, an adjective, you'll see a lot is chaste. Her diction is very pure. She doesn't use any word which doesn't appear in the Book of Common Prayer. Almost relatively simple language. And sometimes you might be. Attempted to dismiss it as kind of.

[A]

Of.

[B]

I don't know, fit for the nursery almost. Or childish in. In a negative sense of that word. But here I think there's. There's something almost kind of William Blake like that. A. This very calm surface in a lot of her poetries. Conceals depths that we don't necessarily anticipate.

[A]

So you're thinking of like Tiger, tiger burn.

[B]

Yeah, that kind of. Or, you know, Little Lamb who Made the. That kind of thing that you find in the Songs of Innocence. I don't know if there's any connection between those two or not. I don't know that she was influenced by William Blake. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't have any proof of it.

[A]

So that was one of my first thoughts as I was reading it, is that there's a. There's an innocence here. And that sing songy kind of nursery. Right thing it feels. And I don't see that as a negative at all. But, like, there's a. There's a childlike innocence. Which I think is connected to the whole concept of wonder.

[B]

And you say an innocence. Yeah, there's an innocence. Almost kind of a naivete. But there's also this definite intangible violence that this poem.

[A]

Yes, but even in. About the violence, like, maybe I should wait till we get there. But just like the sister feeling like, well, I'm just gonna go down there and deal with these goblins. Like, there's a childlike innocence there. Like, you don't even conceive of the danger that you're in.

[B]

And you tell me if I'm. Is there something almost kind of Grimm, like Grimm's Fairy Tale, like about the goblins themselves?

[A]

Oh, I hadn't thought about that. But I will tell you what did come to mind. And so I looked it up as I was reading it, I kept thinking, this is George McDonald's the Princess and the Goblin.

[B]

Oh, yeah, no, that. That's.

[A]

The Goblins are totally out of McDonald's.

[B]

Thank you for saying that. I. I was thinking about that earlier today myself, and I. But I completely forgot.

[A]

Okay. So I looked it up to see which came first. And she came first. So she' 1862. And the Princess and the Goblin is written in 1870. It's published serially at first. It comes out in novel form in 1872. But the McDonald's knew the Rosettis. They were in the same circles. Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote about how he was at a party where both Christina Rossetti and George McDonald were there. So they were definitely in the same circle. And I couldn't. I couldn't find anything on the interwebs, but I'm gonna. I just did a quick Google search and I didn't go through JSTOR or anything, but there's. I'd love to know if anybody has direct correlation between this poem and the Princess and the Goblin.

[B]

Well, you know, I'd say it's about 50. 50, because I had thought of this myself. You had thought of this. And usually when you say, I wonder if there's any correlation or if I'm the first to notice this, you are the first to notice it. And then when I say, I wonder if there's any correlation, and if I'm the first to notice this, it turns out like 50 people have thought of this before. So I don't know, maybe like only a few people will have thought of it this time. It'll be some sort of split the difference sort of thing. But, yeah, whenever I have a brilliant thought, I find it's. It's an echo of someone else's.

[A]

It is bizarrely uncanny how many times I'll think, oh, I'm reading something and I hear an echo of another book, and I'll tell you and you'll say, oh, there might be something to that. And then I look it up and I will find that the author explicitly said it. Like. Like when I was reading. Like when I was reading Vanity Fair and we. Remember, we were driving in the car and I said to. To you. You know, While I'm reading Vanity Fair, I can't help but think, this is War and Peace. And you were like, oh. And that's why I kind of.

[B]

Yeah, I'd never thought of that.

[A]

So I laid it all out for you and I was like, see? And you're like, oh, my gosh, it totally is the same. And then. But I was driving. So you pulled out your phone and you looked it up, and we found that Tolstoy said, oh, yeah, 100 Vanity Fair is what I based Warren P.

[B]

We were both jumping up and down in the car, and it's probably good we didn't get an accident because that, like, the officer on the scene would get a really weird explanation for how that happened.

[A]

Pick up an echo. I'm almost always right. Like, I can't even think of a time I've been wrong about that.

[B]

No, it's like after you said that, it was like the most obvious thing in the world. It's like, oh, yeah. I mean, even. It's even the same war, for crying out loud. It was same.

[A]

Like Napoleon.

[B]

Yeah. There's like displaced young people who are, you know, trying to make their way in a world and. Yeah, it's. It was. It was one of your best moments, Ms. Stanley.

[A]

Thank you. All right, well, should we kind of dip our feet in or should we. Or should we save all of that for next.

[B]

Some. Yeah, the opening lines here.

[A]

Okay, go for it.

[B]

All right, so. Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti. Morning and evening maids heard the goblins cry. Come buy our orchard fruits. Come buy, come buy. Apples and quinces, lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries, melons and raspberries bloomed down cheeked peaches, swart headed mulberries, Wild freeborn cranberries, crab apples, dewberries, pineapples, blackberries, apricots, strawberries all ripe together in summer weather. Morns that pass by, fair eves that fly, Come by, come buy our grapes Fresh from the vine. Pomegranates full and fine dates and sharp bullasses, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try. Currants and gooseberries, Bright fire like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth. Citrons from the south, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye. Come by, come by.

[A]

And citrons, that's. That's French for lemon citron.

[B]

Oh, that's correct. Yeah. By the way, I had to look up, I think three or four items in that list, like some of the more obscure I heard of damson's before. A damson is a. That's a type of apple, isn't it?

[A]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[B]

I think it is. And. But bolisses. I didn't know what that some of these. It's kind of interesting, though, I think I was thinking that people who have had a Charlotte Mason style education probably will be better suited to picture some of the. Some of the items of fruit that she enumerates in this catalog here than the rest of us. And that's something that writers used to be able to presume a lot of in their knowledge is just knowledge of the flora, of the outdoors, wild and domesticated.

[A]

A lot of critics have made the point and they're completely right, that part of the reason we don't know how to read poetry is that we don't know nature.

[B]

Yeah. You can't see an alder tree or an ilex tree or whatever kind of tree that you know. Yeah, yeah. When you're reading pastoral poetry especially, that becomes confusing quickly.

[A]

So I come into this coal. I know nothing about Goblin Market. Right. And I'm. And so I'm reading this and my first thought was, what am I reading? Like, this seems like a nursery rhyme. This seems like kind of a metal goose.

[B]

Kind of. Yeah, like that was actually. I remember thinking that same thing when I first read this in college, probably.

[A]

Then I got really excited when I realized, oh, it's forbidden fruit roots.

[B]

It's the story of a fall.

[A]

Exactly. And when I realized that, I got excited. So I'm thinking, we've been talking for an hour. I'm thinking, let's just call this episode the introduction, because the poem itself is not very long. And then next week you can deal with how to read this poem the right way. What are some of the wrong ways people have read it? And see if we can bring.

[B]

It's actually kind of impressive how many ways people have contrived.

[A]

I was reading that. Oh, I bet they did this, and I bet they did that. But even. Even with my very good imagination, you still surprised me with some of the crazy things that people said.

[B]

A lot of them. I'll just say a lot of them that I have encountered. Anyway, want to make this poem about something more, I don't know, topically significant or up to date or, I don't know, speaks to our times than I think Rossetti intended.

[A]

Well, it goes down to, is this a surface level or is there something under the surface? Is this a horizontal or a vertical reading? And talk about that next week. I think this is going to be a fan. As I was reading, I got so excited because I thought this is the perfect poem to do after the Literary Tradition episode, because we're going to be able to just walk through this poem and say, look, if you're, if you're following the literary tradition, it's very clear what this means. Like, it's not even, it's not even funny. It's not even close to being anything else. But if you're not, look at all of the ditches you can fall into on the side of the road. So we'll talk about what are those mistakes and, and how they're getting to those wrong conclusions. And hopefully in that discussion, we'll learn not only to appreciate this work, but also to gain deeper understanding into how you know you're reading things the right way. And what exactly is the mistake that people are making in some of the wonky interpretations that we get. So, no, I think this is great. Well chosen. I really enjoyed this. Maybe I'll read it a second time before we do the next episode. That was really good. All right, so guys, stick around to the end of this episode because Mr. Banks is going to have a special poem for us. And again, you can support this podcast by going to patreon.com backslash literarylife or you can go to houseofhumaneletters.com to find out about our conference or any of our webinars. You can go to cassiodoruspress.com which is our new publishing wing that we launched last year to continue in our work of restoring the lost intellectual tradition. You can pick up Dr. Baxter's book books. We are going to have some announcements coming up later this year of some other projects we've got going on. So yeah, thanks for listening. Thanks for being part of this community. And until next time, guys, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook disclaimer. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[B]

A Green Cornfield by Christina Rossetti. The earth was green, the sky was blue. I saw and heard one sunny morn, a skylark hang between the two, A singing speck above the corn, a stage below in gay accord White butterflies danced on the wing, and still the singing skylark soared, and silence sank and soared to sing. The cornfield stretched a tender green to right and left, left beside my walks. I knew he had a nest unseen somewhere among the million stalks, and as I paused to hear his song while swift, the sunny moment slid. Perhaps his mate sat listening long and listened longer than I did.