Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862):
“We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?”
And later:
“She sucked and sucked and sucked the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She sucked until her lips were sore”
The poem runs on two vocabularies that shouldn’t coexist: the commodity language of the market (buy, sell, merchant, coin, penny) and the language of bodily appetite that has no transaction in it (suck, taste, juice, hunger). Rossetti holds them in the same stanza without letting either vocabulary win. The goblins sell; Laura consumes. But what she consumes isn’t what they sold — the fruit has no price once tasted, only consequence. The market vocabulary collapses at the moment of contact and what replaces it is all mouth.
The word fruit itself sits at the hinge. Does the philologist’s method see a split here — between fruit as commodity (the thing with a price) and fruit as consequence (the fruit of sin, the fruit of the womb)?
Fruitless to me, though Fruit be here to excess
Milton, Paradise Lost (Book IX)
Eve says this before she eats. The line holds both registers in a single breath and a single word: fruitless (without result, barren, void of consequence) pressed against Fruit (the physical object, the thing on the branch, the thing with weight and surface). The commodity sense governs Fruit — it is here, it is to excess, it is countable and present. The consequence sense governs fruitless — nothing will come of coming here, no yield, no bearing.
What Milton does that Rossetti inherits: the split isn’t between two uses of fruit in different passages. It’s inside a single line, where the word and its negation travel in opposite directions. By the time Eve eats, the commodity is gone — there is only fruitless left, in the other sense, spreading forward through the rest of the poem.
Rossetti’s goblins are selling what Milton’s Serpent is offering. Neither transaction completes.
The consequence sense of fruit — “any consequence, outcome, or result” — arrived in English in the late fourteenth century, two centuries after the commodity sense. In Latin fructus, there was no split: useful yield, spiritual fruit, offspring, revenue — nine layers in the same word, none separated out. The gap opened in transit.
Milton’s Eve says the line holding both senses apart because she’s at the seam where they’re about to separate permanently. The structure underneath is Matthew 12:33’s irreducible identity: siquidem ex fructu arbor agnoscitur — produce and consequence are one fact — and Matthew 7:19 closes it: Omnis arbor quae non facit fructum bonum exciditur et in ignem mittitur, the axe already at the root. She can hold the senses apart for one breath because the eating hasn’t happened yet; the Fall is what makes the split grammatically possible. Before it, her sentence describes a tree standing at the axe. Rossetti’s goblins operate in the after — commodity-only fruit, detached from any arbor, answerable to nothing. The consequence returns anyway, but as appetite’s aftermath, not as Matthew’s fire.