![]() ![]() Now Rossetti grew up in a fairly literate and intellectual household. Throw into the mix the relatively high mortality rate in Great Britain (remember, bad sanitation, no antibiotics, etc.) around that time, and you start to see why death was a more present reality for a 19 year old 150 years ago than it might be today. Beginning in 1843, her father was continually sick with either the world's worst case of bronchitis, or, possibly, tuberculosis, and she herself had a serious mental breakdown sometime in the 1840s. By the time she was 18, Rossetti had learned much about the fragility of life. Well, let's backtrack just a second here-maybe this isn't as strange as it may seem. It's hard to believe that somebody who was just 19 was already thinking about such unpleasant things, and in the context of love no less. The speaker, after all, commands her beloved no less than three times to remember her after she dies, almost as if she were afraid he might forget. In many ways, "Remember" sometimes sounds more like something somebody would write after they found out they had terminal cancer. We're not here to talk about "Goblin Market," though, but rather one of those "other poems" that Rossetti published along with it: " Remember." Written in 1849, when Rossetti was just 19 years old, "Remember" is an interesting little sonnet that is obsessed with being remembered after death. Nowadays, this is pretty much considered Christina Rossetti's magnum opus, the poem for which she is best remembered. Talk about odd, right? That poem was called "Goblin Market" (probably because of the, well, goblins) and it first appeared in a volume of poetry called, fittingly, Goblin Market and Other Poems. Christina Rossetti publishes a volume of poetry, the centerpiece of which is a strange little bugger in which a woman eats some tainted fruit that she purchases from goblins and then has to be saved by a courageous sister. ![]() London, 1862: the height of the Victorian Period. ![]()
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