The next poem that appeared in England, however—Christina Rossetti’s _Goblin Market_, written in 1859—is so akin to _Christabel_ in its overtones of folk magic and so alien to the temporally intervening French poetry on variant themes that it is best to examine it here. It is generally regarded as variant or even lesbian, but the vivid narrative is too symbolic for precise sexual interpretation. On the surface it recounts that two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as they stroll at dusk are daily tempted by “goblin men” to buy the most luscious of ripe fruits. Though knowing the fruits to be forbidden, Laura succumbs, pays with a curl of her golden hair (having no money), and partakes alone, Lizzie having fled. “She sucked their fruit globes fair or red ... sucked and sucked and sucked ... until her tongue was sore....” After this indulgence she can no longer see or hear the goblins, and wastes away with pining for their delicacies. When she seems “knocking at Death’s door,” Lizzie, aware that another girl in like case has recently died, goes to purchase fruit for her sister with honest coin. The goblins refuse her money and use every means to force their wares between her own lips, but she resists and returns so dripping with crushed fruit that she is hopeful of bringing some satisfaction to her sister. Laura kisses her hungrily, but more in gratitude for the dreadful risk she has run than in greed for what lingers “in dimples of her chin.” Indeed, the fruit now scorches Laura’s lips and is wormwood on her tongue, so that from loathing she is seized with violent convulsion and falls unconscious. In the morning she awakes cured, and Lizzie suffers no ill effects at all. As a translation of voluptuous experience into decorous terms the poem cannot be equaled, but any attempt at literal reconstruction of the experience bogs down in the symbolic details. Certain points however are implicit in the text: Laura’s experience is a complete sexual release which it needs no acquaintance with Freud to recognize as oral-erotic. All the goblins are male, but they are grotesque, repulsive, more animal than human save for their ability to hawk their wares, and these irresistible wares take the shapes of ripe cherries, peaches, plums, melons, “figs that fill the mouth”—in short, the whole catalog of age-old symbols for female charms. Although the sisters are described as “Sleeping in their curtained bed Cheek to cheek and breast to breast,” there is no more incestuous lesbian implication here than in Sidney’s _Arcadia_. These embraces are plainly symbols of the innocence from which Laura lapses and to which she returns by virtue of Lizzie’s steadfast purity. Perhaps the only safe inference is that Laura’s “fall” is solitary, even subjectively induced (psychiatric records prove fantasy to be an adequate agent). Her subsequent neurotic inhibition is the product of guilt, and ends in a releasing hysteric convulsion somehow brought about by Lizzie’s ministrations.