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Doubtless the most familiar references to illness in the poetry of Christina Rossetti appear in Gobiin Market after Lizzie's sister Laura has banqueted on the sumptuous fruits proffered by the demonic Goblin men (the only males, one recalls, who actually appear in the poem). Ecstatic for the moment, Laura returns to the maidens' garden cottage promising to bring her sister "plums . .. / Fresh on their mother twigs" and "cherries worth getting." She describes her feast in detail:
"You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap."1
Such delicate fruits would, in our own age, appear to be a tonic for any illness, but Laura's allusion to iconic lilies, in this context, suggests the delusory quality of her gustatory experience: soon, in fact, "her tree of life drooped from the root" (1. 260). She is overwhelmed by "her heart's sore ache" and an unquenchable "passionate yearning" (11. 261, 266). She sickens, says the narrative voice:
Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away. (11. 277-280)
With "sunk eyes and faded mouth" (1. 288), her final stages of deterioration begin. In a both literally and figuratively pivotal passage that appears about midway through the poem, when Laura, "dwindling/Seemed knocking at Death's door" (11. 320-321), her sister Lizzie is reminded of
Eventually, of course, Lizzie braves the Goblin glen and the vicious assaults of the demons themselves, to return dripping with fruit juices which Laura sucks from her body and by which she is miraculously saved, indeed resurrected: "Life out of death" (1. 524), we are told, was their effect. As with so many modern vaccines, the antidote to the disease-presumably unavailable to Jeanie-is derived from its source.
Before leaving this passage about Jeanie, crucial to a number of the poem's ideological resonances, we should observe its striking statement of causality and its equally startling collocation of associations: here "joys...