A Literary Analysis Of 'Goblin Market'

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"Goblin Market" centers around one girl who has a love for the wonderful, but does not realize that the wondrous is often disguised as the wonderful. While these two terms seem the same, wonderful is rooted in naivety and wondrous exposes the ways of the real world in a cruel way. Laura falls prey to the disguise that the wondrous puts on, and at the end of the poem, her entire belief system has been altered for good. Laura's ideas were based on the songs and stories she would have heard when she was younger, which places the goblins in a sense of the wonderful, though they are incredibly dangerous. The reader can see Laura shift from innocence to distrust and brokenness through the similes scattered throughout the poem as she starts out as something out of a romantic tale to a broken shell of a woman. Fairy tales that seem wonderful in the sense of gaiety, like how the goblins seemed at first, are reflected in the fourth stanza, while after the goblins have become more of the wondrousness of monsters, the simile in the third to last stanza shows how Laura has changed from the naive to being harshly reminded of the real world, no matter how fantastic it seems. The wonderful in "Goblin Market" is expressed in the early …show more content…

Instead of a handsome knight to save the day, real people who are aware of the dangers, like Lizzie, are the rescuers. Because Lizzie waited until the last possible second to save her sister, Lizzie became the knight, and Laura's beliefs were changed. The similes throughout the poem show how this ordeal has altered Laura and her belief systems beyond repair: before she was free and sure of herself, like the ship about to sail. Now Laura is adrift like the uprooted tree, just as the reader will be if they do not heed this tale of the wonderful and the

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