"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry

Earlier today I posted "'Come buy,' call the goblins," in which I quote six lines from Christina Rossetti's long poem "Goblin Market" -- and of these six, the one I promote to headline status is the one that says, "Come buy." It's a major theme in the poem, which contains no fewer than 21 instances of "Come buy."

For my lower-level English classes for children, I maintain a spreadsheet of every vocabulary item (word/meaning pair) in their textbooks and on which pages each occurs. When I'm preparing to teach a particular page, I can then see at a glance which words on it should already be thoroughly familiar to my students, which they have encountered once or twice before, and which may be totally new to them.

This afternoon, I was preparing to teach this passage:

With a few clicks of the mouse, I sorted my spreadsheet so that every word on this page (and the facing page, not pictured) was listed in descending order of how many times it had appeared previously in the textbooks. What immediately jumped out at me was -- come buy!

Come had previously appeared in their material 37 times; buy, 35 -- and thus the two words came to be put together in that order.

After taking the above screenshot so I could put it in this post, I noticed that if you read from ask to buy -- keeping in mind that these are words from an article about growing vegetables, ordered according to how many times they had previously appeared in a particular set of textbooks -- it almost reads as a coherent utterance. Very little tweaking is needed:

Ask these, for when many water[s] them their every need did [provide], why then [did they] come buy?

Before and after that section, the series of words has no apparent meaning -- only the part I happened to include in my screenshot.

In "Goblin Market," the goblins try to sell faerie fruit to unsuspecting maidens. The textbook article is about vegetables, but the illustration is a huge photo of a pumpkin -- which is not only technically a fruit but perhaps the goblin fruit par excellence, due to its association with Halloween.

No sooner had I typed that than I glanced down at my desk and saw something I had put there just this morning and then promptly forgotten about: a little plastic bag of individually wrapped candies with jack-o'-lanterns on the wrappers.

The candies had been included as a free gift with something my wife had ordered online, and she had given them to me to bring to the school for my students. I had commented at the time how strange it was for them to have given her free Halloween candy in May.

The goblins in the poem sell typical sweet fruits -- "Apples and quinces, / Lemons and oranges, / Plump unpeck'd cherries," and so on -- but recasting the goblin fruits as pumpkins made me notice a connection I hadn't made before: an incident in one of Whitley Strieber's books where one of his goblin-like alien visitors appears to be going door-to-door selling squash. You can read about it in my June 2021 post "Cucurbits from an alien land." The post even mentions that I had misremembered the story, thinking it had been pumpkins that the alien was selling. (Pumpkins and squash are the same in Chinese anyway.)

This is all weird for sure. We'll see where it goes.