I’ve never read a book of poetry cover to cover before, although I’ve often told myself I could if I wanted to. It might have been the antiquated romance of my University’s classic book store, or that The Goblin Market by Rosetti was already one of my favourite poems, or (most likely) that at a slim 90 pages this book was very approachable… but for whatever reason I finally decided that I did want to read a book focusing solely on the works of one poet.
If you can’t tell this from my rating: this didn’t end up being the enjoyable experience. The book started off with The Goblin Market (yay!), which was then followed by some other, slightly more vengeful but still enjoyable poems like Maude Clare and Cousin Kate. What followed after this brief period of bliss was what I can only describe as the Victorian equivalent of the tumblr page of a 16 year old emo kid. All the poems fall into a couple categories:
The latter 60% of the book was devoted exclusively to these themes. It was so tiring. It felt like every second poem could have been called “Love and death”. In the introduction to this book, Elizabeth Jennings (the “chooser” of the choice of Rosetti’s verse) gave the disclaimer that Rosetti wrote very few happy poems, but I still wasn’t prepared for this.
I’ve given it two stars because I still love The Goblin Market, because I picked up a couple other gems (e.g. Maude Clare), and because I really enjoyed how tightly Rosetti captured a sense of rhythm in all her poems, which made them really fun to read out loud. I would recommend that anyone who wants to read some Rosetti stick to the 10 or so poems that seem to have made it into the English literature canon.