I have walked a great while over the snow, The poem is about a number of things, not least the Victorian ‘marriage market’ and the way women were treated in Victorian society (i.e., you had to be the ‘good wife’ or ‘angel in the house’ or face stern censure and judgment). Laura succumbs to temptation and tastes the fruit sold by the goblins of the poem’s title. It’s probably the most famous poem Rossetti wrote, a long narrative poem about two sisters, Lizzie and Laura. Well, this poem has goblins in it, so that already makes it pretty fantastical – and fantastic!
It’s fitting that the poem inspired Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, since Browning’s poem, like King’s novels about Roland the Gunslinger, is a curious blend of fantasy and Gothic horror. Soil to a plash? Toads in a poison’d tank,īrowning’s universe was darker than Tennyson’s, as this long dramatic monologue – a Gothic take on the quest narrative – makes clear.
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage Glad was I when I reach’d the other bank. Robert Browning, ‘ Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. Undoubtedly one of Tennyson’s greatest poetic achievements, and one of his best fantastical poems.Ħ.
The poem, partly inspired by Arthurian legend, partly by Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and partly by Tennyson’s reading of Keats, has been read as an allegory about the world of fancy and the world of reality, with the idyllic world of magic and legend which Tennyson depicts being threatened by the arrival of new forces (the Industrial Revolution?). Tennyson’s classic poem exists in two versions: a 20-stanza poem published in 1832, and the revised version of 19 stanzas – which is the one readers are most familiar with – which was published in 1842.
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