This division allows us to explore the tensions at work in the poem within the context of its major themes - temptation, fall, redemption, and restoration. "Goblin Market" divides into four major sections making up the story's plot. By advancing through the major sequence of events that make up the poem's fairy-tale story while exploring the tensions created by the poem's sets of opposing doubles, we begin to see "Goblin Market" as a microcosm of the unknowability of the human soul. "Goblin Market" is not so much a cautionary tale as it is a construction of a mystery. In the poem, as in her increasingly reclusive life, Rossetti consciously draws the reader deep into the heart of the story, only to reveal nothing. As in "Winter: My Secret," Rossetti tantalizes us with what is unspoken, with what may or may not be. Perhaps the key to understanding "Goblin Market" lies not so much in pinpointing one particular meaning but in accepting the poem's deliberate ambiguity. The ambiguous quality of the poem's tale - the overtly Christian message coupled with hedonistic abandon, the free-flowing play of the poem's meter halted by the rigid formality of its close, the embodiment of female autonomy undone by a retreat into the domestic sphere - offers the reader many clues to meaning but no definitive answers. Econciling the disparate aspects of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is no easy task.
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