To label Goblin Market as a children's poem opens the door for Rossetti to explore "themes of the evil of self-indulgence, the fraudulence of sensuous beauty and the supreme duty of renunciation [which] become all the more sinister when disguised as whimsical child's play", without blatantly acknowledging to herself or to her readers that this is what she is doing. ... First, she plays out a wild abandonment as she feasts on the goblin fruits, then she becomes miserable and undergoes a dispirited decline as she craves more and more of the pleasure she had experienced from the fruit, ...

• Word Count: 3193
• Approx Pages: 13
• Has Bibliography

The word "England" or "English" occurs six times in this poem. That's a lot for a poem that is only 14 lines! In this poem England is like a mother to the soldier; she gave birth to him, nourished him, made him who he is. But England is also immortal. Even though, in death, the soldier must leave En...

• Word Count: 3268
• Approx Pages: 13
• Grade Level: High School

The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887 was felt by many to represent the end of an era. An end-of-century stoicism, and a growing pessimism among writers and intellectuals, may be traced to several sources, not least the publica...

• Word Count: 10566
• Approx Pages: 42