The Full Text of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”
1.
1Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
2 Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
3They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
4 Without some stir of heart, some malady;
5They could not sit at meals but feel how well
6 It soothed each to be the other by;
7They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
8But to each other dream, and nightly weep.
2.
9With every morn their love grew tenderer,
10 With every eve deeper and tenderer still;
11He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
12 But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
13And his continual voice was pleasanter
14 To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
15Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
16She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.
3.
17He knew whose gentle hand was at the latch,
18 Before the door had given her to his eyes;
19And from her chamber-window he would catch
20 Her beauty farther than the falcon spies;
21And constant as her vespers would he watch,
22 Because her face was turn’d to the same skies;
23And with sick longing all the night outwear,
24To hear her morning-step upon the stair.
4.
25A whole long month of May in this sad plight
26 Made their cheeks paler by the break of June:
27“To-morrow will I bow to my delight,
28 To-morrow will I ask my lady’s boon.”—
29“O may I never see another night,
30 Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love’s tune.”—
31So spake they to their pillows; but, alas,
32Honeyless days and days did he let pass;
5.
33Until sweet Isabella’s untouch’d cheek
34 Fell sick within the rose’s just domain,
35Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek
36 By every lull to cool her infant’s pain:
37“How ill she is,” said he, “I may not speak,
38 And yet I will, and tell my love all plain:
39If looks speak love-laws, I will drink her tears,
40And at the least ’twill startle off her cares.”
6.
41So said he one fair morning, and all day
42 His heart beat awfully against his side;
43And to his heart he inwardly did pray
44 For power to speak; but still the ruddy tide
45Stifled his voice, and puls’d resolve away—
46 Fever’d his high conceit of such a bride,
47Yet brought him to the meekness of a child:
48Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!
7.
49So once more he had wak’d and anguished
50 A dreary night of love and misery,
51If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed
52 To every symbol on his forehead high;
53She saw it waxing very pale and dead,
54 And straight all flush’d; so, lisped tenderly,
55“Lorenzo!”—here she ceas’d her timid quest,
56But in her tone and look he read the rest.
8.
57“O Isabella, I can half perceive
58 That I may speak my grief into thine ear;
59If thou didst ever any thing believe,
60 Believe how I love thee, believe how near
61My soul is to its doom: I would not grieve
62 Thy hand by unwelcome pressing, would not fear
63Thine eyes by gazing; but I cannot live
64Another night, and not my passion shrive.
9.
65“Love! thou art leading me from wintry cold,
66 Lady! thou leadest me to summer clime,
67And I must taste the blossoms that unfold
68 In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time.”
69So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
70 And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:
71Great bliss was with them, and great happiness
72Grew, like a lusty flower in June’s caress.
10.
73Parting they seem’d to tread upon the air,
74 Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
75Only to meet again more close, and share
76 The inward fragrance of each other’s heart.
77She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair
78 Sang, of delicious love and honey’d dart;
79He with light steps went up a western hill,
80And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d his fill.
11.
81All close they met again, before the dusk
82 Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
83All close they met, all eves, before the dusk
84 Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
85Close in a bower of hyacinth and musk,
86 Unknown of any, free from whispering tale.
87Ah! better had it been for ever so,
88Than idle ears should pleasure in their woe.
12.
89Were they unhappy then?—It cannot be—
90 Too many tears for lovers have been shed,
91Too many sighs give we to them in fee,
92 Too much of pity after they are dead,
93Too many doleful stories do we see,
94 Whose matter in bright gold were best be read;
95Except in such a page where Theseus’ spouse
96Over the pathless waves towards him bows.
13.
97But, for the general award of love,
98 The little sweet doth kill much bitterness;
99Though Dido silent is in under-grove,
100 And Isabella’s was a great distress,
101Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove
102 Was not embalm’d, this truth is not the less—
103Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,
104Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.
14.
105With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
106 Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
107And for them many a weary hand did swelt
108 In torched mines and noisy factories,
109And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
110 In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
111Many all day in dazzling river stood,
112To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
15.
113For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
114 And went all naked to the hungry shark;
115For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death
116 The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
117Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
118 A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
119Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
120That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
16.
121Why were they proud? Because their marble founts
122 Gush’d with more pride than do a wretch’s tears?—
123Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts
124 Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?—
125Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts
126 Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?—
127Why were they proud? again we ask aloud,
128Why in the name of Glory were they proud?
17.
129Yet were these Florentines as self-retired
130 In hungry pride and gainful cowardice,
131As two close Hebrews in that land inspired,
132 Paled in and vineyarded from beggar-spies;
133The hawks of ship-mast forests—the untired
134 And pannier’d mules for ducats and old lies—
135Quick cat’s-paws on the generous stray-away,—
136Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay.
18.
137How was it these same ledger-men could spy
138 Fair Isabella in her downy nest?
139How could they find out in Lorenzo’s eye
140 A straying from his toil? Hot Egypt’s pest
141Into their vision covetous and sly!
142 How could these money-bags see east and west?—
143Yet so they did—and every dealer fair
144Must see behind, as doth the hunted hare.
19.
145O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!
146 Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon,
147And of thy spicy myrtles as they blow,
148 And of thy roses amorous of the moon,
149And of thy lilies, that do paler grow
150 Now they can no more hear thy ghittern’s tune,
151For venturing syllables that ill beseem
152The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme.
20.
153Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale
154 Shall move on soberly, as it is meet;
155There is no other crime, no mad assail
156 To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet:
157But it is done—succeed the verse or fail—
158 To honour thee, and thy gone spirit greet;
159To stead thee as a verse in English tongue,
160An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.
21.
161These brethren having found by many signs
162 What love Lorenzo for their sister had,
163And how she lov’d him too, each unconfines
164 His bitter thoughts to other, well nigh mad
165That he, the servant of their trade designs,
166 Should in their sister’s love be blithe and glad,
167When 'twas their plan to coax her by degrees
168To some high noble and his olive-trees.
22.
169And many a jealous conference had they,
170 And many times they bit their lips alone,
171Before they fix’d upon a surest way
172 To make the youngster for his crime atone;
173And at the last, these men of cruel clay
174 Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone;
175For they resolved in some forest dim
176To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him.
23.
177So on a pleasant morning, as he leant
178 Into the sun-rise, o’er the balustrade
179Of the garden-terrace, towards him they bent
180 Their footing through the dews; and to him said,
181“You seem there in the quiet of content,
182 Lorenzo, and we are most loth to invade
183Calm speculation; but if you are wise,
184Bestride your steed while cold is in the skies.
24.
185“To-day we purpose, ay, this hour we mount
186 To spur three leagues towards the Apennine;
187Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
188 His dewy rosary on the eglantine.”
189Lorenzo, courteously as he was wont,
190 Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine;
191And went in haste, to get in readiness,
192With belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman’s dress.
25.
193And as he to the court-yard pass’d along,
194 Each third step did he pause, and listen’d oft
195If he could hear his lady’s matin-song,
196 Or the light whisper of her footstep soft;
197And as he thus over his passion hung,
198 He heard a laugh full musical aloft;
199When, looking up, he saw her features bright
200Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.
26.
201“Love, Isabel!” said he, “I was in pain
202 Lest I should miss to bid thee a good morrow:
203Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain
204 I am to stifle all the heavy sorrow
205Of a poor three hours’ absence? but we’ll gain
206 Out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow.
207Good bye! I’ll soon be back.”—“Good bye!” said she—
208And as he went she chanted merrily.
27.
209So the two brothers and their murder’d man
210 Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream
211Gurgles through straiten’d banks, and still doth fan
212 Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
213Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
214 The brothers’ faces in the ford did seem,
215Lorenzo’s flush with love.—They pass’d the water
216Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.
28.
217There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
218 There in that forest did his great love cease;
219Ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win,
220 It aches in loneliness—is ill at peace
221As the break-covert blood-hounds of such sin:
222 They dipp’d their swords in the water, and did tease
223Their horses homeward, with convulsed spur,
224Each richer by his being a murderer.
29.
225They told their sister how, with sudden speed,
226 Lorenzo had ta’en ship for foreign lands,
227Because of some great urgency and need
228 In their affairs, requiring trusty hands.
229Poor Girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed,
230 And ’scape at once from Hope’s accursed bands;
231To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
232And the next day will be a day of sorrow.
30.
233She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
234 Sorely she wept until the night came on,
235And then, instead of love, O misery!
236 She brooded o’er the luxury alone:
237His image in the dusk she seem’d to see,
238 And to the silence made a gentle moan,
239Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
240And on her couch low murmuring “Where? O where?”
31.
241But Selfishness, Love’s cousin, held not long
242 Its fiery vigil in her single breast;
243She fretted for the golden hour, and hung
244 Upon the time with feverish unrest—
245Not long—for soon into her heart a throng
246 Of higher occupants, a richer zest,
247Came tragic; passion not to be subdued,
248And sorrow for her love in travels rude.
32.
249In the mid days of autumn, on their eves,
250 The breath of Winter comes from far away,
251And the sick west continually bereaves
252 Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
253Of death among the bushes and the leaves
254 To make all bare before he dares to stray
255From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
256By gradual decay from beauty fell,
33.
257Because Lorenzo came not. Oftentimes
258 She ask’d her brothers, with an eye all pale,
259Striving to be itself, what dungeon climes
260 Could keep him off so long? They spake a tale
261Time after time, to quiet her. Their crimes
262 Came on them, like a smoke from Hinnom’s vale;
263And every night in dreams they groan’d aloud,
264To see their sister in her snowy shroud.
34.
265And she had died in drowsy ignorance,
266 But for a thing more deadly dark than all;
267It came like a fierce potion, drunk by chance,
268 Which saves a sick man from the feather’d pall
269For some few gasping moments; like a lance,
270 Waking an Indian from his cloudy hall
271With cruel pierce, and bringing him again
272Sense of the gnawing fire at heart and brain.
35.
273It was a vision.—In the drowsy gloom,
274 The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot
275Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb
276 Had marr’d his glossy hair which once could shoot
277Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
278 Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
279From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears
280Had made a miry channel for his tears.
36.
281Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;
282 For there was striving, in its piteous tongue,
283To speak as when on earth it was awake,
284 And Isabella on its music hung:
285Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
286 As in a palsied Druid’s harp unstrung;
287And through it moan’d a ghostly under-song,
288Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.
37.
289Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
290 With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
291From the poor girl by magic of their light,
292 The while it did unthread the horrid woof
293Of the late darken’d time,—the murderous spite
294 Of pride and avarice,—the dark pine roof
295In the forest,—and the sodden turfed dell,
296Where, without any word, from stabs he fell.
38.
297Saying moreover, “Isabel, my sweet!
298 Red whortle-berries droop above my head,
299And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
300 Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed
301Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
302 Comes from beyond the river to my bed:
303Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
304And it shall comfort me within the tomb.
39.
305“I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
306 Upon the skirts of Human-nature dwelling
307Alone: I chant alone the holy mass,
308 While little sounds of life are round me knelling,
309And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
310 And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
311Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
312And thou art distant in Humanity.
40.
313“I know what was, I feel full well what is,
314 And I should rage, if spirits could go mad;
315Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss,
316 That paleness warms my grave, as though I had
317A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss
318 To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad;
319Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
320A greater love through all my essence steal.”
41.
321The Spirit mourn’d “Adieu!”—dissolv’d, and left
322 The atom darkness in a slow turmoil;
323As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,
324 Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,
325We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
326 And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:
327It made sad Isabella’s eyelids ache,
328And in the dawn she started up awake;
42.
329“Ha! ha!” said she, “I knew not this hard life,
330 I thought the worst was simple misery;
331I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife
332 Portion’d us—happy days, or else to die;
333But there is crime—a brother’s bloody knife!
334 Sweet Spirit, thou hast school’d my infancy:
335I’ll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes,
336And greet thee morn and even in the skies.”
43.
337When the full morning came, she had devised
338 How she might secret to the forest hie;
339How she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
340 And sing to it one latest lullaby;
341How her short absence might be unsurmised,
342 While she the inmost of the dream would try.
343Resolv’d, she took with her an aged nurse,
344And went into that dismal forest-hearse.
44.
345See, as they creep along the river side,
346 How she doth whisper to that aged Dame,
347And, after looking round the champaign wide,
348 Shows her a knife.—“What feverous hectic flame
349“Burns in thee, child?—What good can thee betide,
350 That thou should’st smile again?”—The evening came,
351And they had found Lorenzo’s earthy bed;
352The flint was there, the berries at his head.
45.
353Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard,
354 And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
355Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
356 To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
357Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d,
358 And filling it once more with human soul?
359Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
360When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.
46.
361She gaz’d into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
362 One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
363Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
364 Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
365Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow,
366 Like to a native lily of the dell:
367Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
368To dig more fervently than misers can.
47.
369Soon she turn’d up a soiled glove, whereon
370 Her silk had play’d in purple phantasies,
371She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone,
372 And put it in her bosom, where it dries
373And freezes utterly unto the bone
374 Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries:
375Then ’gan she work again; nor stay’d her care,
376But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
48.
377That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
378 Until her heart felt pity to the core
379At sight of such a dismal labouring,
380 And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
381And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
382 Three hours they labour’d at this travail sore;
383At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
384And Isabella did not stamp and rave.
49.
385Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
386 Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
387O for the gentleness of old Romance,
388 The simple plaining of a minstrel’s song!
389Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance,
390 For here, in truth, it doth not well belong
391To speak:—O turn thee to the very tale,
392And taste the music of that vision pale.
50.
393With duller steel than the Persean sword
394 They cut away no formless monster’s head,
395But one, whose gentleness did well accord
396 With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
397Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
398 If Love impersonate was ever dead,
399Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d.
400’Twas love; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethroned.
51.
401In anxious secrecy they took it home,
402 And then the prize was all for Isabel:
403She calm’d its wild hair with a golden comb,
404 And all around each eye’s sepulchral cell
405Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
406 With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
407She drench’d away:—and still she comb’d, and kept
408Sighing all day—and still she kiss’d, and wept.
52.
409Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews
410 Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby,
411And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
412 Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,—
413She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose
414 A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
415And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set
416Sweet basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
53.
417And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
418 And she forgot the blue above the trees,
419And she forgot the dells where waters run,
420 And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
421She had no knowledge when the day was done,
422 And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
423Hung over her sweet basil evermore,
424And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.
54.
425And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
426 Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
427So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
428 Of basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew
429Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
430 From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
431So that the jewel, safely casketed,
432Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.
55.
433O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
434 O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
435O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
436 Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
437Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
438 Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
439And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
440Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.
56.
441Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
442 From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
443Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
444 And touch the strings into a mystery;
445Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
446 For simple Isabel is soon to be
447Among the dead: She withers, like a palm
448Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.
57.
449O leave the palm to wither by itself;
450 Let not quick Winter chill its dying hour!—
451It may not be—those Baalites of pelf,
452 Her brethren, noted the continual shower
453From her dead eyes; and many a curious elf,
454 Among her kindred, wonder’d that such dower
455Of youth and beauty should be thrown aside
456By one mark’d out to be a noble’s bride.
58.
457And, furthermore, her brethren wonder’d much
458 Why she sat drooping by the basil green,
459And why it flourish’d, as by magic touch;
460 Greatly they wonder’d what the thing might mean:
461They could not surely give belief, that such
462 A very nothing would have power to wean
463Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
464And even remembrance of her love’s delay.
59.
465Therefore they watch’d a time when they might sift
466 This hidden whim; and long they watch’d in vain;
467For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift,
468 And seldom felt she any hunger-pain;
469And when she left, she hurried back, as swift
470 As bird on wing to breast its eggs again;
471And, patient as a hen-bird, sat her there
472Beside her basil, weeping through her hair.
60.
473Yet they contriv’d to steal the basil-pot,
474 And to examine it in secret place:
475The thing was vile with green and livid spot,
476 And yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face:
477The guerdon of their murder they had got,
478 And so left Florence in a moment’s space,
479Never to turn again.—Away they went,
480With blood upon their heads, to banishment.
61.
481O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
482 O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
483O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
484 From isles Lethean, sigh to us—o sigh!
485Spirits of grief, sing not you “Well-a-way!”
486 For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
487Will die a death too lone and incomplete,
488Now they have ta’en away her basil sweet.
62.
489Piteous she look’d on dead and senseless things,
490 Asking for her lost basil amorously;
491And with melodious chuckle in the strings
492 Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry
493After the pilgrim in his wanderings,
494 To ask him where her basil was; and why
495’Twas hid from her: “For cruel ’tis,” said she,
496“To steal my basil-pot away from me.”
63.
497And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,
498 Imploring for her basil to the last.
499No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
500 In pity of her love, so overcast.
501And a sad ditty of this story born
502 From mouth to mouth through all the country pass’d:
503Still is the burthen sung—“O cruelty,
504“To steal my basil-pot away from me!”
The Full Text of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”
1.
1Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
2 Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
3They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
4 Without some stir of heart, some malady;
5They could not sit at meals but feel how well
6 It soothed each to be the other by;
7They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
8But to each other dream, and nightly weep.
2.
9With every morn their love grew tenderer,
10 With every eve deeper and tenderer still;
11He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
12 But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
13And his continual voice was pleasanter
14 To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
15Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
16She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.
3.
17He knew whose gentle hand was at the latch,
18 Before the door had given her to his eyes;
19And from her chamber-window he would catch
20 Her beauty farther than the falcon spies;
21And constant as her vespers would he watch,
22 Because her face was turn’d to the same skies;
23And with sick longing all the night outwear,
24To hear her morning-step upon the stair.
4.
25A whole long month of May in this sad plight
26 Made their cheeks paler by the break of June:
27“To-morrow will I bow to my delight,
28 To-morrow will I ask my lady’s boon.”—
29“O may I never see another night,
30 Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love’s tune.”—
31So spake they to their pillows; but, alas,
32Honeyless days and days did he let pass;
5.
33Until sweet Isabella’s untouch’d cheek
34 Fell sick within the rose’s just domain,
35Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek
36 By every lull to cool her infant’s pain:
37“How ill she is,” said he, “I may not speak,
38 And yet I will, and tell my love all plain:
39If looks speak love-laws, I will drink her tears,
40And at the least ’twill startle off her cares.”
6.
41So said he one fair morning, and all day
42 His heart beat awfully against his side;
43And to his heart he inwardly did pray
44 For power to speak; but still the ruddy tide
45Stifled his voice, and puls’d resolve away—
46 Fever’d his high conceit of such a bride,
47Yet brought him to the meekness of a child:
48Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!
7.
49So once more he had wak’d and anguished
50 A dreary night of love and misery,
51If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed
52 To every symbol on his forehead high;
53She saw it waxing very pale and dead,
54 And straight all flush’d; so, lisped tenderly,
55“Lorenzo!”—here she ceas’d her timid quest,
56But in her tone and look he read the rest.
8.
57“O Isabella, I can half perceive
58 That I may speak my grief into thine ear;
59If thou didst ever any thing believe,
60 Believe how I love thee, believe how near
61My soul is to its doom: I would not grieve
62 Thy hand by unwelcome pressing, would not fear
63Thine eyes by gazing; but I cannot live
64Another night, and not my passion shrive.
9.
65“Love! thou art leading me from wintry cold,
66 Lady! thou leadest me to summer clime,
67And I must taste the blossoms that unfold
68 In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time.”
69So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
70 And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:
71Great bliss was with them, and great happiness
72Grew, like a lusty flower in June’s caress.
10.
73Parting they seem’d to tread upon the air,
74 Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
75Only to meet again more close, and share
76 The inward fragrance of each other’s heart.
77She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair
78 Sang, of delicious love and honey’d dart;
79He with light steps went up a western hill,
80And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d his fill.
11.
81All close they met again, before the dusk
82 Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
83All close they met, all eves, before the dusk
84 Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
85Close in a bower of hyacinth and musk,
86 Unknown of any, free from whispering tale.
87Ah! better had it been for ever so,
88Than idle ears should pleasure in their woe.
12.
89Were they unhappy then?—It cannot be—
90 Too many tears for lovers have been shed,
91Too many sighs give we to them in fee,
92 Too much of pity after they are dead,
93Too many doleful stories do we see,
94 Whose matter in bright gold were best be read;
95Except in such a page where Theseus’ spouse
96Over the pathless waves towards him bows.
13.
97But, for the general award of love,
98 The little sweet doth kill much bitterness;
99Though Dido silent is in under-grove,
100 And Isabella’s was a great distress,
101Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove
102 Was not embalm’d, this truth is not the less—
103Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,
104Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.
14.
105With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
106 Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
107And for them many a weary hand did swelt
108 In torched mines and noisy factories,
109And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
110 In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
111Many all day in dazzling river stood,
112To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
15.
113For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
114 And went all naked to the hungry shark;
115For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death
116 The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
117Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
118 A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
119Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
120That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.
16.
121Why were they proud? Because their marble founts
122 Gush’d with more pride than do a wretch’s tears?—
123Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts
124 Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?—
125Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts
126 Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?—
127Why were they proud? again we ask aloud,
128Why in the name of Glory were they proud?
17.
129Yet were these Florentines as self-retired
130 In hungry pride and gainful cowardice,
131As two close Hebrews in that land inspired,
132 Paled in and vineyarded from beggar-spies;
133The hawks of ship-mast forests—the untired
134 And pannier’d mules for ducats and old lies—
135Quick cat’s-paws on the generous stray-away,—
136Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay.
18.
137How was it these same ledger-men could spy
138 Fair Isabella in her downy nest?
139How could they find out in Lorenzo’s eye
140 A straying from his toil? Hot Egypt’s pest
141Into their vision covetous and sly!
142 How could these money-bags see east and west?—
143Yet so they did—and every dealer fair
144Must see behind, as doth the hunted hare.
19.
145O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!
146 Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon,
147And of thy spicy myrtles as they blow,
148 And of thy roses amorous of the moon,
149And of thy lilies, that do paler grow
150 Now they can no more hear thy ghittern’s tune,
151For venturing syllables that ill beseem
152The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme.
20.
153Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale
154 Shall move on soberly, as it is meet;
155There is no other crime, no mad assail
156 To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet:
157But it is done—succeed the verse or fail—
158 To honour thee, and thy gone spirit greet;
159To stead thee as a verse in English tongue,
160An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.
21.
161These brethren having found by many signs
162 What love Lorenzo for their sister had,
163And how she lov’d him too, each unconfines
164 His bitter thoughts to other, well nigh mad
165That he, the servant of their trade designs,
166 Should in their sister’s love be blithe and glad,
167When 'twas their plan to coax her by degrees
168To some high noble and his olive-trees.
22.
169And many a jealous conference had they,
170 And many times they bit their lips alone,
171Before they fix’d upon a surest way
172 To make the youngster for his crime atone;
173And at the last, these men of cruel clay
174 Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone;
175For they resolved in some forest dim
176To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him.
23.
177So on a pleasant morning, as he leant
178 Into the sun-rise, o’er the balustrade
179Of the garden-terrace, towards him they bent
180 Their footing through the dews; and to him said,
181“You seem there in the quiet of content,
182 Lorenzo, and we are most loth to invade
183Calm speculation; but if you are wise,
184Bestride your steed while cold is in the skies.
24.
185“To-day we purpose, ay, this hour we mount
186 To spur three leagues towards the Apennine;
187Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
188 His dewy rosary on the eglantine.”
189Lorenzo, courteously as he was wont,
190 Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine;
191And went in haste, to get in readiness,
192With belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman’s dress.
25.
193And as he to the court-yard pass’d along,
194 Each third step did he pause, and listen’d oft
195If he could hear his lady’s matin-song,
196 Or the light whisper of her footstep soft;
197And as he thus over his passion hung,
198 He heard a laugh full musical aloft;
199When, looking up, he saw her features bright
200Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.
26.
201“Love, Isabel!” said he, “I was in pain
202 Lest I should miss to bid thee a good morrow:
203Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain
204 I am to stifle all the heavy sorrow
205Of a poor three hours’ absence? but we’ll gain
206 Out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow.
207Good bye! I’ll soon be back.”—“Good bye!” said she—
208And as he went she chanted merrily.
27.
209So the two brothers and their murder’d man
210 Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream
211Gurgles through straiten’d banks, and still doth fan
212 Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
213Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
214 The brothers’ faces in the ford did seem,
215Lorenzo’s flush with love.—They pass’d the water
216Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.
28.
217There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
218 There in that forest did his great love cease;
219Ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win,
220 It aches in loneliness—is ill at peace
221As the break-covert blood-hounds of such sin:
222 They dipp’d their swords in the water, and did tease
223Their horses homeward, with convulsed spur,
224Each richer by his being a murderer.
29.
225They told their sister how, with sudden speed,
226 Lorenzo had ta’en ship for foreign lands,
227Because of some great urgency and need
228 In their affairs, requiring trusty hands.
229Poor Girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed,
230 And ’scape at once from Hope’s accursed bands;
231To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
232And the next day will be a day of sorrow.
30.
233She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
234 Sorely she wept until the night came on,
235And then, instead of love, O misery!
236 She brooded o’er the luxury alone:
237His image in the dusk she seem’d to see,
238 And to the silence made a gentle moan,
239Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
240And on her couch low murmuring “Where? O where?”
31.
241But Selfishness, Love’s cousin, held not long
242 Its fiery vigil in her single breast;
243She fretted for the golden hour, and hung
244 Upon the time with feverish unrest—
245Not long—for soon into her heart a throng
246 Of higher occupants, a richer zest,
247Came tragic; passion not to be subdued,
248And sorrow for her love in travels rude.
32.
249In the mid days of autumn, on their eves,
250 The breath of Winter comes from far away,
251And the sick west continually bereaves
252 Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
253Of death among the bushes and the leaves
254 To make all bare before he dares to stray
255From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
256By gradual decay from beauty fell,
33.
257Because Lorenzo came not. Oftentimes
258 She ask’d her brothers, with an eye all pale,
259Striving to be itself, what dungeon climes
260 Could keep him off so long? They spake a tale
261Time after time, to quiet her. Their crimes
262 Came on them, like a smoke from Hinnom’s vale;
263And every night in dreams they groan’d aloud,
264To see their sister in her snowy shroud.
34.
265And she had died in drowsy ignorance,
266 But for a thing more deadly dark than all;
267It came like a fierce potion, drunk by chance,
268 Which saves a sick man from the feather’d pall
269For some few gasping moments; like a lance,
270 Waking an Indian from his cloudy hall
271With cruel pierce, and bringing him again
272Sense of the gnawing fire at heart and brain.
35.
273It was a vision.—In the drowsy gloom,
274 The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot
275Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb
276 Had marr’d his glossy hair which once could shoot
277Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
278 Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
279From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears
280Had made a miry channel for his tears.
36.
281Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;
282 For there was striving, in its piteous tongue,
283To speak as when on earth it was awake,
284 And Isabella on its music hung:
285Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
286 As in a palsied Druid’s harp unstrung;
287And through it moan’d a ghostly under-song,
288Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among.
37.
289Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
290 With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
291From the poor girl by magic of their light,
292 The while it did unthread the horrid woof
293Of the late darken’d time,—the murderous spite
294 Of pride and avarice,—the dark pine roof
295In the forest,—and the sodden turfed dell,
296Where, without any word, from stabs he fell.
38.
297Saying moreover, “Isabel, my sweet!
298 Red whortle-berries droop above my head,
299And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
300 Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed
301Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
302 Comes from beyond the river to my bed:
303Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
304And it shall comfort me within the tomb.
39.
305“I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
306 Upon the skirts of Human-nature dwelling
307Alone: I chant alone the holy mass,
308 While little sounds of life are round me knelling,
309And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
310 And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
311Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
312And thou art distant in Humanity.
40.
313“I know what was, I feel full well what is,
314 And I should rage, if spirits could go mad;
315Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss,
316 That paleness warms my grave, as though I had
317A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss
318 To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad;
319Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
320A greater love through all my essence steal.”
41.
321The Spirit mourn’d “Adieu!”—dissolv’d, and left
322 The atom darkness in a slow turmoil;
323As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,
324 Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,
325We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
326 And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:
327It made sad Isabella’s eyelids ache,
328And in the dawn she started up awake;
42.
329“Ha! ha!” said she, “I knew not this hard life,
330 I thought the worst was simple misery;
331I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife
332 Portion’d us—happy days, or else to die;
333But there is crime—a brother’s bloody knife!
334 Sweet Spirit, thou hast school’d my infancy:
335I’ll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes,
336And greet thee morn and even in the skies.”
43.
337When the full morning came, she had devised
338 How she might secret to the forest hie;
339How she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
340 And sing to it one latest lullaby;
341How her short absence might be unsurmised,
342 While she the inmost of the dream would try.
343Resolv’d, she took with her an aged nurse,
344And went into that dismal forest-hearse.
44.
345See, as they creep along the river side,
346 How she doth whisper to that aged Dame,
347And, after looking round the champaign wide,
348 Shows her a knife.—“What feverous hectic flame
349“Burns in thee, child?—What good can thee betide,
350 That thou should’st smile again?”—The evening came,
351And they had found Lorenzo’s earthy bed;
352The flint was there, the berries at his head.
45.
353Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard,
354 And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
355Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
356 To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
357Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d,
358 And filling it once more with human soul?
359Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
360When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.
46.
361She gaz’d into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
362 One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
363Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
364 Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
365Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow,
366 Like to a native lily of the dell:
367Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
368To dig more fervently than misers can.
47.
369Soon she turn’d up a soiled glove, whereon
370 Her silk had play’d in purple phantasies,
371She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone,
372 And put it in her bosom, where it dries
373And freezes utterly unto the bone
374 Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries:
375Then ’gan she work again; nor stay’d her care,
376But to throw back at times her veiling hair.
48.
377That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
378 Until her heart felt pity to the core
379At sight of such a dismal labouring,
380 And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
381And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
382 Three hours they labour’d at this travail sore;
383At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
384And Isabella did not stamp and rave.
49.
385Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
386 Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
387O for the gentleness of old Romance,
388 The simple plaining of a minstrel’s song!
389Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance,
390 For here, in truth, it doth not well belong
391To speak:—O turn thee to the very tale,
392And taste the music of that vision pale.
50.
393With duller steel than the Persean sword
394 They cut away no formless monster’s head,
395But one, whose gentleness did well accord
396 With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
397Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
398 If Love impersonate was ever dead,
399Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d.
400’Twas love; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethroned.
51.
401In anxious secrecy they took it home,
402 And then the prize was all for Isabel:
403She calm’d its wild hair with a golden comb,
404 And all around each eye’s sepulchral cell
405Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
406 With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
407She drench’d away:—and still she comb’d, and kept
408Sighing all day—and still she kiss’d, and wept.
52.
409Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews
410 Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby,
411And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
412 Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,—
413She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose
414 A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
415And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set
416Sweet basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
53.
417And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
418 And she forgot the blue above the trees,
419And she forgot the dells where waters run,
420 And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
421She had no knowledge when the day was done,
422 And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
423Hung over her sweet basil evermore,
424And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.
54.
425And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
426 Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
427So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
428 Of basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew
429Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
430 From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
431So that the jewel, safely casketed,
432Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.
55.
433O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
434 O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
435O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
436 Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
437Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
438 Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
439And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
440Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.
56.
441Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
442 From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
443Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
444 And touch the strings into a mystery;
445Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
446 For simple Isabel is soon to be
447Among the dead: She withers, like a palm
448Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.
57.
449O leave the palm to wither by itself;
450 Let not quick Winter chill its dying hour!—
451It may not be—those Baalites of pelf,
452 Her brethren, noted the continual shower
453From her dead eyes; and many a curious elf,
454 Among her kindred, wonder’d that such dower
455Of youth and beauty should be thrown aside
456By one mark’d out to be a noble’s bride.
58.
457And, furthermore, her brethren wonder’d much
458 Why she sat drooping by the basil green,
459And why it flourish’d, as by magic touch;
460 Greatly they wonder’d what the thing might mean:
461They could not surely give belief, that such
462 A very nothing would have power to wean
463Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
464And even remembrance of her love’s delay.
59.
465Therefore they watch’d a time when they might sift
466 This hidden whim; and long they watch’d in vain;
467For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift,
468 And seldom felt she any hunger-pain;
469And when she left, she hurried back, as swift
470 As bird on wing to breast its eggs again;
471And, patient as a hen-bird, sat her there
472Beside her basil, weeping through her hair.
60.
473Yet they contriv’d to steal the basil-pot,
474 And to examine it in secret place:
475The thing was vile with green and livid spot,
476 And yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face:
477The guerdon of their murder they had got,
478 And so left Florence in a moment’s space,
479Never to turn again.—Away they went,
480With blood upon their heads, to banishment.
61.
481O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
482 O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
483O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
484 From isles Lethean, sigh to us—o sigh!
485Spirits of grief, sing not you “Well-a-way!”
486 For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
487Will die a death too lone and incomplete,
488Now they have ta’en away her basil sweet.
62.
489Piteous she look’d on dead and senseless things,
490 Asking for her lost basil amorously;
491And with melodious chuckle in the strings
492 Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry
493After the pilgrim in his wanderings,
494 To ask him where her basil was; and why
495’Twas hid from her: “For cruel ’tis,” said she,
496“To steal my basil-pot away from me.”
63.
497And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,
498 Imploring for her basil to the last.
499No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
500 In pity of her love, so overcast.
501And a sad ditty of this story born
502 From mouth to mouth through all the country pass’d:
503Still is the burthen sung—“O cruelty,
504“To steal my basil-pot away from me!”
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Introduction
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Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil is the English Romantic poet John Keats's retelling of a grisly tale from Boccaccio's Decameron. This narrative poem tells the story of Isabella and Lorenzo, a pair of young lovers in medieval Florence whose romance is thwarted by Isabella's conniving, greedy brothers. Despising Lorenzo (who's their employee, and thus lower in status than they are) and scheming to marry Isabella off to a rich lord, the brothers lure Lorenzo into the woods and murder him. But his ghost returns to Isabella and tells her where he's buried. Isabella digs Lorenzo up, carries his head home, and plants it in a pot of basil, the better to weep over her beloved. Keats first collected this idiosyncratic homage to an Italian master in his 1820 collection Poems, the last book he published before his untimely death.
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Summary
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"Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil" retells a story from Boccaccio's Decameron, in which a young Florentine noblewoman named Isabella falls desperately in love with Lorenzo, her brothers' employee. The poem starts by describing how the pair come to adore each other from afar. Driven to distraction by love, but at first too timid to say so, they at last confess their feelings for each other, kiss, and rejoice.
For many days and nights, the pair secretly meet and embrace, relishing the deepest love for each other—a state which, the poem's narrator remarks, should have carried on forever. The narrator looks ahead in time and notes that, although the couple's love was doomed, they enjoyed total bliss for the little time they got to be together. However, he observes, it's the most dangerous loves that are the sweetest.
Isabella, the narrator goes on, lived with her two brothers. They were part of a rich merchant family—a family that had gained all its wealth by exploiting others, from laborers in factories to enslaved people. The brothers' pride and luxury was built on the backs of countless suffering workers. What, the narrator wonders, made these lazy, exploitative men so very proud of themselves?
Greedy and focused solely on wealth, the brothers might not even have noticed that Isabella and Lorenzo (their employee) were in love—except for the fact that this romance interfered with their plans. They had intended to marry Isabella off to a wealthy nobleman and thus enrich themselves further. Lorenzo's affair with their sister is an affront to both their pride and their finances. (In the midst of explaining this, the narrator steps in to offer apologies to Boccaccio, the original teller of this tale—perhaps because Boccaccio doesn't include any of these motives for the brothers' actions in his story. Keats is here admitting he's stepped in to editorialize on his own themes.)
The brothers cook up a villainous scheme to murder Lorenzo. On a beautiful morning, they lure him out on the pretext of going hunting. Unsuspecting, Lorenzo bids Isabella a cheerful farewell and rides out into the woods with the brothers, who stab him and bury him in the woods.
The brothers tell Isabella that Lorenzo has been suddenly called away on a business matter. Isabella laments his absence, missing all the pleasures of love she believed they were about to share. As time goes on and he doesn't return, her feelings change from simple longing for Lorenzo to grief over what he must be suffering in his (supposed) faraway travels. Worrying for her beloved, Isabella gradually pines away, growing thin and pale and ill. Even the villainous brothers begin to feel guilty at this sight, and in their dreams they're haunted by visions of Isabella lying dead.
One dark night, Isabella has a terrible vision. At the foot of her bed, she sees the bedraggled ghost of Lorenzo, with tears cutting through the mud on his cheeks and love still burning in its eerie eyes. The ghost tells Isabella of his murder and lets her know where she can find his corpse, begging her to go and pay a visit to his grave. His love for her, he tells her, persists even past death. Isabella startles awake from this terrible vision and vows that she will do as Lorenzo's ghost has asked her.
The next morning, Isabella takes her nurse (that is, the elderly servant who cared for her when she was a child) and goes into the forest, where she quickly finds the grave Lorenzo's ghost described. In a fever of horror, Isabella begins to dig the grave up, finding first a glove, then the rest of Lorenzo's body. (Keats here makes a little aside, telling readers to turn back to the original tale in Boccaccio if they find themselves disturbed by what he's describing here.) Isabella and the nurse, finding Lorenzo's corpse still intact and not decomposed, cut off its head. Isabella kisses the head's lips.
Isabella and the nurse carry Lorenzo's head home, where Isabella washes it and combs its hair, then wraps it in a silk scarf and buries it in a pot of basil. This done, she withdraws from life completely, spending all her time weeping over her basil. Nourished by Lorenzo's head and Isabella's tears, the basil flourishes. Keats invokes the spirits of Melancholy, Music, Echo (the mythological nymph who died for love of Narcissus), and Melpomene (the muse of tragedy) to gather round Isabella, saying that she can't last long like this. Mourning over her basil pot, she's wasting away.
Isabella's brothers (and the rest of her family) notice that there's something wrong with her and wonder why she's wasting away over this pot of basil. At last, the brothers find a moment in which they can steal the basil pot, and rooting around in its depths, they find Lorenzo's rotten head. Understanding that their murderous deeds are going to be discovered, they flee Florence, never to return again.
Keats now banishes all the spirits he has just summoned, telling them it's no time for sad music now. Isabella, deprived of the consolation of her basil pot, will soon waste away and die. And indeed, Isabella spends the rest of her life wandering around asking where her basil has gone, lamenting how cruel it is to take her basil from her. When she dies, all Florence mourns for her and her sad love. A folk song arises from this tale, with a refrain that echoes Isabella's lament: How cruel to take my basil pot away!
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Themes
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Love and Death
"Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil" is Keats's retelling of a story from Boccaccio's Decameron. It's also a very Keatsian reflection on the relationship between the world's deepest joys and its deepest sorrows, between love and death, beauty and grief.
It doesn't take long for readers to understand that this poem is going to be a tragedy. Even those who haven't read the Decameron can work that much out from the Romeo and Juliet-ish setup: Isabella, a rich young lady, falls in love with Lorenzo, a handsome young man from a lower class, and her arrogant brothers don't like it. The lovers will only have a short time together before the brothers murder Lorenzo.
But for all that this story ends in awful tragedy, Keats insists, we shouldn't pity the lovers too much. For "Too many tears for lovers have been shed," even when those lovers are tragic figures. While love exists, it's a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, and a bad ending can't take that away: a love that ends tragically isn't itself inherently tragic.
By the same token, though, the beauty of love can't gloss over the real horror of death. When Isabella finds her murdered lover's corpse in the woods, beheads it, and plants her grisly "prize" in a basil pot to weep over it, the basil flourishes in a way that one might read as redemptive. "Perfumed" new life is springing from the grave. But that redemption can't be complete. Isabella's grief is real, Lorenzo's "mouldering head" is all too real, and the fearsome physical reality of death can't be ignored. Just because the basil makes a pretty picture doesn't mean that life triumphs.
But then, death doesn't triumph either. Through his intense juxtaposition of life's greatest joys and death's greatest horrors, Keats thus refuses to reject either side of human experience in favor of the other. Joy comes from sorrow, beauty comes from horror. Honest art admits of—and embraces—both sides at once, without underplaying either.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Wealth, Materialism, and Status
Keats's telling of "Isabella" inserts a little extra social commentary into Boccaccio's medieval tale. By examining the sources of the two villainous brothers' money and power, Keats suggests that the status of the wealthy is built on the back of a suffering underclass. This situation, he observes, is both unjust and downright ludicrous: why anyone should be "proud" to gain their glory through the oppression of others is beyond him. The poem thus becomes a thinly veiled commentary on Keats's own society.
Isabella's brothers are part of medieval Florence's upper crust, a wealthy merchant family who have made their money through trade. As such, they're powerful, greedy, and terribly snooty. When Isabella falls in love with their employee Lorenzo, they're angry both because they see Lorenzo as beneath them and because he's getting in the way of their using Isabella as a business tool: they want to marry her off to a rich lord to further burnish their wealth and status.
But "why in the name of Glory," Keats's narrator asks, were these two men so very "proud"? For none of their wealth came from their own work or their own merits. Rather, they got to where they are because a lot of other people toiled and (literally) slaved. The brothers don't make anything or do anything: they just sponge off the labor of people in "torched mines and noisy factories." Worse, they leave a trail of violence and corruption in their wake. It's because of them and their ilk that enslaved people suffer the "stinging whip" and pearl divers' ears "gush[] blood."
The idea that wealth is something to be proud of thus strikes this poem's narrator as ludicrous and corrupting. Not only do the brothers' enterprises rest on the back of awful suffering, but their desire to preserve their sense of status through their wealth makes them into murderers.
Keats clearly isn't just talking about medieval Florence, here. His allusions to factories and slave labor make it clear that he's addressing the sins of the 19th-century world around him, and with a good deal of righteous disgust.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”
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Lines 1-8, Between Lines 8-9, Lines 9-16
Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.
2.
With every morn their love grew tenderer,
With every eve deeper and tenderer still;
He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
And his continual voice was pleasanter
To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same."Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil" is John Keats's retelling of an old story from Boccaccio's Decameron, an anthology of tales collected within a frame narrative. That narrative goes: a group of beautiful young people, seven women and three men, flee early-Renaissance Florence for the countryside during an outbreak of plague. They pass the time by telling one another stories. Every day, a new person gets to choose a theme for the others to tell tales about.
Like the good Romantic poet he was, Keats chose to retell one of the collection's sadder, stranger tales: a story from Day 4, when the lovelorn Filostrato instructs his companions to tell tales of unhappy love. (His companions roll their eyes at this instruction. Filostrato, readers can gather, has become a bit of a bore on the subject.) This story is the tale of a thwarted love between Isabella and Lorenzo, a pair of young Florentines.
Keats introduces these two main characters with a dramatic flourish:
Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;Proclaiming these two names, Keats conjures a pair of archetypal young lovers in the space of two lines: Isabella is beautiful and simple (in the sense of "innocent and pure-hearted," not "stupid"), and Lorenzo, like Shakespeare's Romeo, is a "young palmer," a pilgrim to the temple of Love. One doesn't need to know much more than that to guess what's going to happen next.
The pair live in the "self-same mansion," the same house. As readers will later find out, Isabella is the daughter of that house, Lorenzo her family's employee. (Already, things are sounding a little star-crossed.) But here in the beginning, all this means is that the two of them see each other every day, a situation that gives them a mixture of pleasure and acute pain. Their love is like a "malady," an illness. But they also feel "soothed" when they're near each other.
Lorenzo wanders the world in a daze, seeing Isabella before his eyes at all times: "her full shape would all his seeing fill," as Keats sensuously puts it. (That "full shape" is further emphasize by the diacope on "full"/"fill".) Isabella, meanwhile, is essentially writing "Mrs. Lorenzo" on her math folder: when she plays music or does her embroidery, she always seems accidentally to sing or sew her beloved's name.
They're both totally moony over each other, then, as one would expect a fair maiden and a handsome youth to be. There's a certain inevitability about these first lines.
And perhaps that feeling of inevitability comes from two sources:
- This is a story of human nature, of the natural course of young love. Keats knows he's following a pattern: he doesn't need to say why this pair loves each other, they're just going to.
- Anyone who wants to can turn back to Boccaccio and know exactly what happens in this particular story of young love.
By starting out in this familiar vein, Keats emphasizes the fact that he's a reteller, a cover artist. It's rather as if a modern-day singer were to start a song with the words, "Poor Romeo! Sweet Juliet!" Readers know at once what they're getting into.
The assumption that readers know this story and where it's coming from also underscores the big difference between Boccaccio's version of the story and Keats's: Boccaccio writes in prose, Keats in poetry.
This long narrative poem will use 63 octets (eight-line stanzas) of iambic pentameter—that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "They could | not in | the self- | same man- | sion dwell". In setting himself this challenge of poetic fluency, Keats was at once offering a sincere tribute to a story that moved him and showing off his own skill: remixing the work of a master in his own distinctive voice.
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Lines 17-24, Between Lines 24-25, Lines 25-32
He knew whose gentle hand was at the latch,
Before the door had given her to his eyes;
And from her chamber-window he would catch
Her beauty farther than the falcon spies;
And constant as her vespers would he watch,
Because her face was turn’d to the same skies;
And with sick longing all the night outwear,
To hear her morning-step upon the stair.
4.
A whole long month of May in this sad plight
Made their cheeks paler by the break of June:
“To-morrow will I bow to my delight,
To-morrow will I ask my lady’s boon.”—
“O may I never see another night,
Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love’s tune.”—
So spake they to their pillows; but, alas,
Honeyless days and days did he let pass; -
Lines 33-40
Until sweet Isabella’s untouch’d cheek
Fell sick within the rose’s just domain,
Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek
By every lull to cool her infant’s pain:
“How ill she is,” said he, “I may not speak,
And yet I will, and tell my love all plain:
If looks speak love-laws, I will drink her tears,
And at the least ’twill startle off her cares.” -
Between Lines 40-41, Lines 41-48, Between Lines 48-49, Lines 49-56
6.
So said he one fair morning, and all day
His heart beat awfully against his side;
And to his heart he inwardly did pray
For power to speak; but still the ruddy tide
Stifled his voice, and puls’d resolve away—
Fever’d his high conceit of such a bride,
Yet brought him to the meekness of a child:
Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!
7.
So once more he had wak’d and anguished
A dreary night of love and misery,
If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed
To every symbol on his forehead high;
She saw it waxing very pale and dead,
And straight all flush’d; so, lisped tenderly,
“Lorenzo!”—here she ceas’d her timid quest,
But in her tone and look he read the rest. -
Lines 57-64
“O Isabella, I can half perceive
That I may speak my grief into thine ear;
If thou didst ever any thing believe,
Believe how I love thee, believe how near
My soul is to its doom: I would not grieve
Thy hand by unwelcome pressing, would not fear
Thine eyes by gazing; but I cannot live
Another night, and not my passion shrive. -
Lines 65-72
“Love! thou art leading me from wintry cold,
Lady! thou leadest me to summer clime,
And I must taste the blossoms that unfold
In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time.”
So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:
Great bliss was with them, and great happiness
Grew, like a lusty flower in June’s caress. -
Lines 73-80, Between Lines 80-81, Lines 81-88
Parting they seem’d to tread upon the air,
Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart
Only to meet again more close, and share
The inward fragrance of each other’s heart.
She, to her chamber gone, a ditty fair
Sang, of delicious love and honey’d dart;
He with light steps went up a western hill,
And bade the sun farewell, and joy’d his fill.
11.
All close they met again, before the dusk
Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
All close they met, all eves, before the dusk
Had taken from the stars its pleasant veil,
Close in a bower of hyacinth and musk,
Unknown of any, free from whispering tale.
Ah! better had it been for ever so,
Than idle ears should pleasure in their woe. -
Lines 89-96
Were they unhappy then?—It cannot be—
Too many tears for lovers have been shed,
Too many sighs give we to them in fee,
Too much of pity after they are dead,
Too many doleful stories do we see,
Whose matter in bright gold were best be read;
Except in such a page where Theseus’ spouse
Over the pathless waves towards him bows. -
Lines 97-104
But, for the general award of love,
The little sweet doth kill much bitterness;
Though Dido silent is in under-grove,
And Isabella’s was a great distress,
Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove
Was not embalm’d, this truth is not the less—
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,
Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers. -
Lines 105-112, Between Lines 112-113, Lines 113-120
With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
15.
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel. -
Lines 121-128
Why were they proud? Because their marble founts
Gush’d with more pride than do a wretch’s tears?—
Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts
Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?—
Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts
Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?—
Why were they proud? again we ask aloud,
Why in the name of Glory were they proud? -
Lines 129-136, Between Lines 136-137, Lines 137-144
Yet were these Florentines as self-retired
In hungry pride and gainful cowardice,
As two close Hebrews in that land inspired,
Paled in and vineyarded from beggar-spies;
The hawks of ship-mast forests—the untired
And pannier’d mules for ducats and old lies—
Quick cat’s-paws on the generous stray-away,—
Great wits in Spanish, Tuscan, and Malay.
18.
How was it these same ledger-men could spy
Fair Isabella in her downy nest?
How could they find out in Lorenzo’s eye
A straying from his toil? Hot Egypt’s pest
Into their vision covetous and sly!
How could these money-bags see east and west?—
Yet so they did—and every dealer fair
Must see behind, as doth the hunted hare. -
Lines 145-152, Between Lines 152-153, Lines 153-160
O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!
Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon,
And of thy spicy myrtles as they blow,
And of thy roses amorous of the moon,
And of thy lilies, that do paler grow
Now they can no more hear thy ghittern’s tune,
For venturing syllables that ill beseem
The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme.
20.
Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale
Shall move on soberly, as it is meet;
There is no other crime, no mad assail
To make old prose in modern rhyme more sweet:
But it is done—succeed the verse or fail—
To honour thee, and thy gone spirit greet;
To stead thee as a verse in English tongue,
An echo of thee in the north-wind sung. -
Lines 169-176
And many a jealous conference had they,
And many times they bit their lips alone,
Before they fix’d upon a surest way
To make the youngster for his crime atone;
And at the last, these men of cruel clay
Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone;
For they resolved in some forest dim
To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him. -
Lines 177-184, Between Lines 184-185, Lines 185-192
So on a pleasant morning, as he leant
Into the sun-rise, o’er the balustrade
Of the garden-terrace, towards him they bent
Their footing through the dews; and to him said,
“You seem there in the quiet of content,
Lorenzo, and we are most loth to invade
Calm speculation; but if you are wise,
Bestride your steed while cold is in the skies.
24.
“To-day we purpose, ay, this hour we mount
To spur three leagues towards the Apennine;
Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine.”
Lorenzo, courteously as he was wont,
Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine;
And went in haste, to get in readiness,
With belt, and spur, and bracing huntsman’s dress. -
Lines 193-200
And as he to the court-yard pass’d along,
Each third step did he pause, and listen’d oft
If he could hear his lady’s matin-song,
Or the light whisper of her footstep soft;
And as he thus over his passion hung,
He heard a laugh full musical aloft;
When, looking up, he saw her features bright
Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight. -
Lines 201-208
“Love, Isabel!” said he, “I was in pain
Lest I should miss to bid thee a good morrow:
Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain
I am to stifle all the heavy sorrow
Of a poor three hours’ absence? but we’ll gain
Out of the amorous dark what day doth borrow.
Good bye! I’ll soon be back.”—“Good bye!” said she—
And as he went she chanted merrily. -
Lines 209-216
So the two brothers and their murder’d man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream
Gurgles through straiten’d banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
The brothers’ faces in the ford did seem,
Lorenzo’s flush with love.—They pass’d the water
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter. -
Lines 217-224
There was Lorenzo slain and buried in,
There in that forest did his great love cease;
Ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win,
It aches in loneliness—is ill at peace
As the break-covert blood-hounds of such sin:
They dipp’d their swords in the water, and did tease
Their horses homeward, with convulsed spur,
Each richer by his being a murderer. -
Lines 225-232
They told their sister how, with sudden speed,
Lorenzo had ta’en ship for foreign lands,
Because of some great urgency and need
In their affairs, requiring trusty hands.
Poor Girl! put on thy stifling widow’s weed,
And ’scape at once from Hope’s accursed bands;
To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
And the next day will be a day of sorrow. -
Lines 233-240
She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
Sorely she wept until the night came on,
And then, instead of love, O misery!
She brooded o’er the luxury alone:
His image in the dusk she seem’d to see,
And to the silence made a gentle moan,
Spreading her perfect arms upon the air,
And on her couch low murmuring “Where? O where?” -
Lines 241-248
But Selfishness, Love’s cousin, held not long
Its fiery vigil in her single breast;
She fretted for the golden hour, and hung
Upon the time with feverish unrest—
Not long—for soon into her heart a throng
Of higher occupants, a richer zest,
Came tragic; passion not to be subdued,
And sorrow for her love in travels rude. -
Lines 249-256, Between Lines 256-257, Lines 257-264
In the mid days of autumn, on their eves,
The breath of Winter comes from far away,
And the sick west continually bereaves
Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
Of death among the bushes and the leaves
To make all bare before he dares to stray
From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
By gradual decay from beauty fell,
33.
Because Lorenzo came not. Oftentimes
She ask’d her brothers, with an eye all pale,
Striving to be itself, what dungeon climes
Could keep him off so long? They spake a tale
Time after time, to quiet her. Their crimes
Came on them, like a smoke from Hinnom’s vale;
And every night in dreams they groan’d aloud,
To see their sister in her snowy shroud. -
Lines 265-272
And she had died in drowsy ignorance,
But for a thing more deadly dark than all;
It came like a fierce potion, drunk by chance,
Which saves a sick man from the feather’d pall
For some few gasping moments; like a lance,
Waking an Indian from his cloudy hall
With cruel pierce, and bringing him again
Sense of the gnawing fire at heart and brain. -
Lines 273-280, Between Lines 280-281, Lines 281-288
It was a vision.—In the drowsy gloom,
The dull of midnight, at her couch’s foot
Lorenzo stood, and wept: the forest tomb
Had marr’d his glossy hair which once could shoot
Lustre into the sun, and put cold doom
Upon his lips, and taken the soft lute
From his lorn voice, and past his loamed ears
Had made a miry channel for his tears.
36.
Strange sound it was, when the pale shadow spake;
For there was striving, in its piteous tongue,
To speak as when on earth it was awake,
And Isabella on its music hung:
Languor there was in it, and tremulous shake,
As in a palsied Druid’s harp unstrung;
And through it moan’d a ghostly under-song,
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briars among. -
Lines 289-296, Between Lines 296-297, Lines 297-304
Its eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright
With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof
From the poor girl by magic of their light,
The while it did unthread the horrid woof
Of the late darken’d time,—the murderous spite
Of pride and avarice,—the dark pine roof
In the forest,—and the sodden turfed dell,
Where, without any word, from stabs he fell.
38.
Saying moreover, “Isabel, my sweet!
Red whortle-berries droop above my head,
And a large flint-stone weighs upon my feet;
Around me beeches and high chestnuts shed
Their leaves and prickly nuts; a sheep-fold bleat
Comes from beyond the river to my bed:
Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,
And it shall comfort me within the tomb. -
Lines 305-312
“I am a shadow now, alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of Human-nature dwelling
Alone: I chant alone the holy mass,
While little sounds of life are round me knelling,
And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass,
And many a chapel bell the hour is telling,
Paining me through: those sounds grow strange to me,
And thou art distant in Humanity. -
Lines 313-320
“I know what was, I feel full well what is,
And I should rage, if spirits could go mad;
Though I forget the taste of earthly bliss,
That paleness warms my grave, as though I had
A Seraph chosen from the bright abyss
To be my spouse: thy paleness makes me glad;
Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
A greater love through all my essence steal.” -
Lines 321-328
The Spirit mourn’d “Adieu!”—dissolv’d, and left
The atom darkness in a slow turmoil;
As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,
Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,
We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:
It made sad Isabella’s eyelids ache,
And in the dawn she started up awake; -
Lines 329-336
“Ha! ha!” said she, “I knew not this hard life,
I thought the worst was simple misery;
I thought some Fate with pleasure or with strife
Portion’d us—happy days, or else to die;
But there is crime—a brother’s bloody knife!
Sweet Spirit, thou hast school’d my infancy:
I’ll visit thee for this, and kiss thine eyes,
And greet thee morn and even in the skies.” -
Lines 337-344, Between Lines 344-345, Lines 345-352
When the full morning came, she had devised
How she might secret to the forest hie;
How she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
And sing to it one latest lullaby;
How her short absence might be unsurmised,
While she the inmost of the dream would try.
Resolv’d, she took with her an aged nurse,
And went into that dismal forest-hearse.
44.
See, as they creep along the river side,
How she doth whisper to that aged Dame,
And, after looking round the champaign wide,
Shows her a knife.—“What feverous hectic flame
“Burns in thee, child?—What good can thee betide,
That thou should’st smile again?”—The evening came,
And they had found Lorenzo’s earthy bed;
The flint was there, the berries at his head. -
Lines 353-360
Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard,
And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d,
And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt. -
Lines 361-368, Between Lines 368-369, Lines 369-376
She gaz’d into the fresh-thrown mould, as though
One glance did fully all its secrets tell;
Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;
Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow,
Like to a native lily of the dell:
Then with her knife, all sudden, she began
To dig more fervently than misers can.
47.
Soon she turn’d up a soiled glove, whereon
Her silk had play’d in purple phantasies,
She kiss’d it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom, where it dries
And freezes utterly unto the bone
Those dainties made to still an infant’s cries:
Then ’gan she work again; nor stay’d her care,
But to throw back at times her veiling hair. -
Lines 377-384, Between Lines 384-385, Lines 385-392
That old nurse stood beside her wondering,
Until her heart felt pity to the core
At sight of such a dismal labouring,
And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,
And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:
Three hours they labour’d at this travail sore;
At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.
49.
Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance?
Why linger at the yawning tomb so long?
O for the gentleness of old Romance,
The simple plaining of a minstrel’s song!
Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance,
For here, in truth, it doth not well belong
To speak:—O turn thee to the very tale,
And taste the music of that vision pale. -
Lines 393-400
With duller steel than the Persean sword
They cut away no formless monster’s head,
But one, whose gentleness did well accord
With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
If Love impersonate was ever dead,
Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d.
’Twas love; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethroned. -
Lines 401-408, Between Lines 408-409, Lines 409-416
In anxious secrecy they took it home,
And then the prize was all for Isabel:
She calm’d its wild hair with a golden comb,
And all around each eye’s sepulchral cell
Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
She drench’d away:—and still she comb’d, and kept
Sighing all day—and still she kiss’d, and wept.
52.
Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews
Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby,
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully,—
She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose
A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set
Sweet basil, which her tears kept ever wet. -
Lines 417-424, Between Lines 424-425, Lines 425-432
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.
54.
And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
Of basil-tufts in Florence; for it drew
Nurture besides, and life, from human fears,
From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
So that the jewel, safely casketed,
Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread. -
Lines 433-440, Between Lines 440-441, Lines 441-448
O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us—O sigh!
Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.
56.
Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
And touch the strings into a mystery;
Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
For simple Isabel is soon to be
Among the dead: She withers, like a palm
Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm. -
Lines 449-456, Between Lines 456-457, Lines 457-464
O leave the palm to wither by itself;
Let not quick Winter chill its dying hour!—
It may not be—those Baalites of pelf,
Her brethren, noted the continual shower
From her dead eyes; and many a curious elf,
Among her kindred, wonder’d that such dower
Of youth and beauty should be thrown aside
By one mark’d out to be a noble’s bride.
58.
And, furthermore, her brethren wonder’d much
Why she sat drooping by the basil green,
And why it flourish’d, as by magic touch;
Greatly they wonder’d what the thing might mean:
They could not surely give belief, that such
A very nothing would have power to wean
Her from her own fair youth, and pleasures gay,
And even remembrance of her love’s delay. -
Lines 465-472, Between Lines 472-473, Lines 473-480
Therefore they watch’d a time when they might sift
This hidden whim; and long they watch’d in vain;
For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift,
And seldom felt she any hunger-pain;
And when she left, she hurried back, as swift
As bird on wing to breast its eggs again;
And, patient as a hen-bird, sat her there
Beside her basil, weeping through her hair.
60.
Yet they contriv’d to steal the basil-pot,
And to examine it in secret place:
The thing was vile with green and livid spot,
And yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face:
The guerdon of their murder they had got,
And so left Florence in a moment’s space,
Never to turn again.—Away they went,
With blood upon their heads, to banishment. -
Lines 481-488, Between Lines 488-489, Lines 489-496
O Melancholy, turn thine eyes away!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, on some other day,
From isles Lethean, sigh to us—o sigh!
Spirits of grief, sing not you “Well-a-way!”
For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;
Will die a death too lone and incomplete,
Now they have ta’en away her basil sweet.
62.
Piteous she look’d on dead and senseless things,
Asking for her lost basil amorously;
And with melodious chuckle in the strings
Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry
After the pilgrim in his wanderings,
To ask him where her basil was; and why
’Twas hid from her: “For cruel ’tis,” said she,
“To steal my basil-pot away from me.” -
Lines 497-504
And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,
Imploring for her basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
In pity of her love, so overcast.
And a sad ditty of this story born
From mouth to mouth through all the country pass’d:
Still is the burthen sung—“O cruelty,
“To steal my basil-pot away from me!”
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Symbols
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The Basil-Pot
Poor Isabella's basil-pot is a complex symbol, capturing the interwoven relationship between love and death, horror and beauty.
The basil that grows in Isabella's pot is greener and more fragrant than any in Florence. But that's because of the grisly secret hiding within it: Lorenzo's dead and rotting head. Isabella's constant weeping over it helps, too; her grief nourishes it and makes it grow.
The flourishing basil thus suggests the ways in which death and grief might feed life and beauty. But it also works as a reminder that the one and the other don't cancel each other out. These two sides of human existence are in balance, coexistant. The basil's flourishing growth doesn't precisely redeem the young lovers' suffering. But it is also there.
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
Many of the poem's metaphors connect the young lovers to the natural world, and more particularly to the flora, fauna, and weather of the spring and summer. Isabella's love leads Lorenzo from "wintry cold" to "summer clime." The happy young couple are "twin roses." Isabella's lovestruck joy is a "downy nest" for her to rest in. In short, everything about this couple's love feels as if it grew right out of the earth, as natural and as pleasing as blossom in spring.
By the same token, after Lorenzo's disappearance, Isabella's sorrow falls on her like the "breath of winter," and she loses her beauty "by gradual decay," as a tree loses its leaves in the autumn. And when the ghostly Lorenzo puts in his appearance, his voice is like "hoarse-night gusts" blowing through "sepulchral briars" (deathly thorns). No wonder Isabella ends up burying her beloved's head in a pot of basil. Love, for them, is all about metaphorical leafiness, lushness, and growth, and Lorenzo's murder flings them into a winter she longs to undo.
In some moments, love is also to do with poetry. Keats presents the lovers' first kiss as a metaphorical union of summer flowers and verse:
“Love! thou art leading me from wintry cold,
Lady! thou leadest me to summer clime,
And I must taste the blossoms that unfold
In its ripe warmth this gracious morning time.”
So said, his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:In that closing image, two matched pairs of lips work like a matched pair of sounds: a vision of love that also makes a case for the swooning bliss of a good rhyme. In a poem in which Keats pays poetic tribute to Boccaccio, a master of prose, that little celebration of one of the the special joys of verse feels especially apt.
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Simile
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Anaphora
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Apostrophe
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Allusion
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"Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Palmer
- Vespers
- Boon
- The ruddy tide
- Conceit
- Anguished
- Waxing
- Lisped
- Fear
- Shrive
- Poesied
- Lusty
- Honey'd dart
- Doleful
- Theseus’ spouse
- Dido
- Merchandize
- Swelt
- Ceylon diver
- Lazar stairs
- Red-lin’d accounts
- Two close Hebrews
- Pannier'd mules
- Ducats
- Cat's-paws
- Pest
- Ghittern
- Meet
- Appenine
- Matin-song
- Straiten'd
- Widow’s weed
- Roundelay
- Hinnom's vale
- Loamed
- Miry
- Woof
- Portion'd
- Secret to the forest hie
- Champaign
- Mould
- Dainties made to still an infant’s cries
- Hoar
- The Persean sword
- Lethean
- Melpomene
- Baalites of pelf
- Sift
- Guerdon
- Burthen
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A pilgrim: a religious devotee on a holy journey. Keats is likely borrowing both the antiquated word "palmer" and the notion of a lover as a pilgrim from Shakespeare.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”
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Form
"Isabella" is a narrative poem written in 63 octets (eight-line stanzas) of rhymed iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm). Through this form, Keats unfolds his retelling of an episode from Boccaccio's Decameron at luxurious length. He inserts some social commentary, atmospheric detail, and philosophical reflections not present in the original.
But maybe the most important formal consideration here is the fact that this is a poem at all. Translating an Italian prose tale into English poetry, Keats is paying homage to a master of a different form, attempting to honor and salute Boccaccio in "modern rhyme." The tribute sometimes seems to make the young poet feel rather self-conscious. "Succeed the verse or fail," he says warily, "it's done [...] to honour thee": whether or not it's any good, at least it's meant as a compliment.
Keats's verse tribute to Boccaccio thus feels simultaneously humble and ambitious. In putting this old story into "modern rhyme," Keats is making the claim that he has something to add to the classics, that he can offer a fitting English poetic response to one of the foundational works of Italian literature. In the end, however, he wasn't satisfied with his efforts in "Isabella." He famously described the poem as "too smokeable" (that is, too easily mocked) and "mawkish" (sentimental).
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Meter
"Isabella" is written in iambic pentameter. That means the lines use five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 497:
And so | she pined, | and so | she died | forlorn,
Keats studied this meter (one of the most popular and common in English-language poetry) at the feet of two of his great poetic heroes, Shakespeare and Milton. Reading those masters, he would also have found that iambic pentameter is a good rhythm for a long narrative poem (like Milton's Paradise Lost or Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis"). And so it is: lots of spoken English falls naturally into an iambic rhythm, making this meter a useful choice for hypnotic storytelling.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Isabella" follows this rhyme scheme throughout:
ABABABCC
These rhymes mean that each stanza starts with some easy, fluid alternating rhyme, then gets capped with an emphatic couplet. The last two lines of the stanzas often have something particularly pointed or pungent to add, as when Keats closes a description of the morbid thoughts one might have in a churchyard with the words:
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.Keats may have been influenced in his choice of rhyme scheme by Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis"—another long narrative poem about a doomed romance in which a sad lady survives her young lover. While the stanza form isn't exactly identical (Shakespeare uses sestets, Keats octets), the movement from alternating rhymes to a closing couplet works just the same.
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is an omniscient narrator, a storyteller who also seems to be a keen reader. This narrator makes it clear that they're adapting someone else's story: they sometimes praise the beauty of Boccaccio's original tale or make direct apostrophes to Boccaccio himself, apologizing to the master for the liberties they're taking with his art.
One of those liberties is to add a new dimension of social critique to the poem. Moved by the tragic romance of Boccaccio's story, this speaker is also concerned with an element of the plot that Boccaccio himself is less interested in: class and wealth. The jealous, arrogant brothers in the original story certainly don't like that Lorenzo, their employee, is making eyes at their sister. In this poem, the narrator invites readers to have a good think about the ludicrousness of these men's position. They're wealthy and powerful not because they have any special merit of their own, but because they sponge off the labor of countless suffering workers. This angle gives the poem a political element that Boccaccio's tale lacks (and led George Bernard Shaw, writing some years later, to remark that Keats showed signs of being a Marxist before Marx).
The combination of literary veneration, sympathy for doomed lovers, and political outrage makes this narrator sound a lot like Keats himself. A passionate man with a sharp consciousness of the role class and money played in English society (and in his own life), Keats here unites his appreciation for medieval Italian literature with some pungent critique of the 19th-century world around him.
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“Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Setting
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Like the Boccaccio tale it retells, "Isabella" is set in medieval Florence. This is a beautiful, dangerous place, a city of wealth and power in which backstabbing, literal and figurative, is always a possibility.
Keats paints his Florence in romantic shades. At the time he wrote this poem, he had never been to Italy (though he now lies buried there), and his Florence looks more like something out of a tapestry than it does a real city. Full of flowery "garden-terrace[s]," veiled dusks, and deep, dark, fairy-tale-ish woods, this is a landscape of lush fantasy. (Keats does, however, keep his customary loving and specific eye on the flora of the dream-world, noting that Lorenzo's grave is surrounded by "red whortle-berries," "beeches," "high chestnuts," and "heather-bloom.")
But Keats's Florence also has an ugly economic reality. Isabella's brothers make their money from "torched mines and noisy factories"—things that belong much more to Keats's 19th-century England than to the early Italian Renaissance.
The setting thus juxtaposes a long-ago, never-was dream-Italy with a harsh vision of the contemporary workings of wealth. The innocent lovers belong to a world of timeless, ephemeral beauty. The villainous brothers belong to a world in which money matters more than blood.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil”
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Literary Context
John Keats (1795–1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a middle-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet and thoroughly justified faith in his own genius. In a letter, he once declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
In this particular poem, however, he's among the Italians. "Isabella" is a retelling of a tale from Boccaccio: one of the three honored masters of early Italian Renaissance literature, alongside Dante and Petrarch. (Keats did some reading in Dante, too.) More specifically, this story comes from Boccaccio's most enduring work, the Decameron: a Canterbury-Tales-like collection of stories of love, wit, and pleasure, spoken by many voices. (Naturally for a Romantic poet, Keats chooses to retell one of the tales of tragic love.) Keats may have been inspired to start this poem by one of the essayist William Hazlitt's lectures, which Keats attended in 1818: lots of Keats's British contemporaries were studying and thinking about the great Italians.
Keats was among a notable crowd of English poets during his lifetime. He met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics. He never got too close to any of them, however. As a young writer, for instance, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the granddaddy of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one unforgettable conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique. Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Benjamin Haydon.
In spite of being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since later Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning resurrected his reputation, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Historical Context
Keats composed Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil in early 1818, at a moment when he had both mortality and ladies named Isabella much on his mind. He had been taking care of his younger brother Tom, who was then beginning the long, terrible decline into tuberculosis: an ailment that had killed Keats's mother and would eventually take all three Keats brothers, Keats himself included.
Keats had trained as a doctor, and he would have known all too well what his beloved younger brother's hemorrhages meant. Indeed, when he started coughing blood himself in 1820, he announced to his friend Charles Brown:
I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood;—I cannot be deceived by that colour;—that drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.
(These, at least, are his words as Brown remembered them later.)
The poem's visions of innocent youth enduring untimely death seem inflected by Keats's heartbroken love for his brother (as were some of his greatest works, which would be composed in 1819, after Tom's death). Its visions of romantic obsession, meanwhile, might have something to do with the charming, fascinating Isabella Jones, a lady Keats met at the seaside in 1817 and went on flirting with for some while after.
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More “Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil” Resources
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External Resources
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On Keats — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Keats.
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The Poem's Composition in Context — Read about Keats's life around the time he wrote this poem, including some of its possible inspirations.
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The Poem's Influence — Take a look at a famous painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, inspired not by Boccaccio but by Keats's take on Boccaccio.
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Keats's Source — Read Boccaccio's tale in the translation that Keats used. This translation was made in 1620, adding another layer of history to this process of interpretation: a 19th-century poet responding to a 17th-century translation of a 14th-century book.
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On Boccaccio — Read a timeline of Boccaccio's life.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Keats
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