Faithful likenesses: lists of similes in Milton, Shelley, and Rossetti.(Christina Rossetti, John Milton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is full of lists, but these lists come in two distinct varieties. The first type, associated with the goblin men, is a list of objects: either of fruit ("Apples and quinces, / Lemons and oranges, / Plump unpecked cherries," and so on) or of the goblins themselves. The other type of list consists of similes: five times in the poem, either Lizzie or Laura or both together are described by a rapid string of similes ("Like two blossoms on one stem, / Like two flakes of new-fall'n snow, / Like two wands of ivory ..."). (1) Both devices are notable, but the latter is more striking, because a list or catalogue of similes is overtly self-defeating.

Any poetic list is to some extent self-defeating. The list of fruits that begins Goblin Market--sixteen fruits in ten lines (5-14), some with accompanying epithets--provides too much sensory information in quick succession for a reader to be able to picture clearly the individual species. After a certain number, each additional fruit adds to the impression of profusion, but does not actually conjure up a specific image: "Crab-apples, dewberries, / Pine-apples, blackberries, / Apricots, strawberries," coming at the end of the catalogue, are not only indistinct in themselves but even begin to crowd out the apples and quinces with which the list began. Such a list, then, is asymptotic: the first elements suggest a visual image, but each additional element adds less and less, until at a certain point the list could be extended indefinitely without making any noticeable difference to the cumulative picture that has been painted.

The list or catalogue, after all, is typically thought of as the most unpoetic of all rhetorical forms; what could be more banal than a laundry list or a phone book? (2) In A Defence of Poetry Percy Shelley specifically distinguishes between poetry and its opposite, "a catalogue of detached facts." (3) Moreover, a list like the one that begins Goblin Market reveals one of the limitations of poetry: the difficulty of depicting simultaneity. Rossetti presents in temporal succession (since poetry unrolls in time) fruits that are meant to be pictured as coexisting. What would be simple for a still-life painter is almost impossible for a poet, and the poetic list, blurrily rapid but never instantaneous, necessarily reminds the reader of this disadvantage (Ulmer, "Sky-Lark," 250; Gass, 34). Yet if a list of things carries these limitations, a list of similes is still more paradoxical--not just asymptotic, but essentially self-destructive. A simile aims to illustrate, to provide an insight into one or both elements of which it consists; but the first set of similes in Goblin Market does not give us a clearer impression of Laura:

 
  Laura stretched her gleaming neck 
  Like a rush-imbedded swan, 
  Like a lily from the beck, 
  Like a moonlit poplar branch, 
  Like a vessel at the launch 
  When its last restraint is gone. 
  (81-86) 

Some commentators have commended the clarity of these lists, (4) but I find it impossible to imagine someone who is simultaneously like a swan and a lily and a branch and a boat. (Although a simile does not necessarily require the reader to picture its elements distinctly, it does ask us to imagine their physical resemblance at some level.) The effect of this passage in context, where it is read rapidly--especially as it follows the earlier, material lists, which demand to be read trippingly--is self-defeating. The metaphors, as Katherine Mayberry writes, "serve, not as an enriching descriptive method, but as a desperate and hopeless means for defining an essence that is not known" (Mayberry, 99). Each new simile not only fails to add to the previous one, but drives it away, so that Laura, far from becoming clearer to the reader through this series of descriptions, is actually drowned in a surfeit of superimposed images. This failure is purposeful: Laura seems to be asserting her individuality at this moment by doing what her sister does not dare; but in fact she is on the brink of losing herself, of becoming indistinguishable from her desires.

A list of similes, then, is paradoxical: it yokes together the most unpoetic of tropes with the most poetic--since the language of poets, in Shelley's definition, "is vitally metaphorical" (Defence, SPP 512). This conjunction recurs throughout Rossetti's work--she lists similes not only in Goblin Market but also in "A Birthday," briefly in "The Prince's Progress" (the title poem of her second collection), and again in half a dozen less well-known poems throughout her career. Rossetti has several forerunners in the use of this device, Petrarch being the one who comes most immediately to mind. It is no accident that the first girl in Goblin Market to be blazoned in a rush of metaphors and to be rendered powerless by the merchant-men is named "Laura." The compiling of similes is a feature of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition, a tradition with which Rossetti was particularly familiar--she even claimed descent from Petrarch's Laura (Marsh, 212). The name "Lizzie," too, though its significance is more debatable, seems to point toward the Petrarchan tradition: as Catherine Maxwell points out, Lizzie bears a notable resemblance to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Maxwell, 79, 92). Like her namesake in Rossetti's poem, Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguese counters the masculine tradition by seeming to participate in it, thus helping to redeem "Laura" from her position of constraint. Goblin Market appears to be the first installment in Rossetti's long poetic conversation with Petrarch.

Yet Rossetti's lists of similes differ significantly from Petrarch's. It is possible, without contradiction, to string together a list of comparisons in which tenor and vehicle both change. The locus classicus for such a list is the Song of Songs ("Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep, thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate"), which is then imitated in the blazons of Petrarchan sonneteers. Such a string of similes presents few complications. But the situation is entirely different when a single tenor is given a number of different vehicles. In the lines from Goblin Market describing Laura, the four diverse comparisons all apply to one subject. Here lies the great difference from the strings of similes in Petrarch: whereas the traditional sonnet-blazon suggests richness, each additional simile for Laura is impoverishing. The repeated attempts to fasten onto an appropriate vehicle, as Mayberry writes, "suggest uncertainty and incompletion" (99). The poet, rather than showing off the resources of her imagination, seems to be admitting her own incapacity to discover a single sufficient likeness.