‘Verses with a Good Deal about Sucking’: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Christina Rossetti

Abstract

Several years ago I noticed a verbal echo between lines in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (C. Rossetti 1979, pp. 11–26) and verses from the Shelley fragment, Fiordispina. The passage in Goblin Market is an important one, its significance highlighted by D. G. Rossetti’s design that served as title-page to the volume. The lines appear after the first turn or complication of plot in the story — that is, after Laura, refusing to follow her sister Lizzie’s warning, has succumbed to the temptation of eating fruits proffered by goblin men but before the sisters learn the judgement incurred thereby — and describes the beauty of the young women’s relationship as it has existed so far:

Golden head by golden head,

Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings,

They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem,

Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,

Like two wands of ivory Tipped with gold for awful kings.

(lines 184–91)

In Fiordispina (Shelley 1965, Vol. IV, pp. 71–4), the two cousins, Fiordispina and Cosimo, ‘almost like to twins’ (line 11), are described as growing up together ‘like two flowers/Upon one stem’ (lines 15–16).