Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“ISABELLA; or THE POT OF BASIL” by John
Keats (written 1818; first published in 1820)
Going
back to literature that you loved as a teenager can be a chastening experience.
“Did I really like that?” you
say to yourself in disappointment or bemusement as your adult eyes scan
critically what your youthful eyes once devoured uncritically. And yet it is
not always a negative experience. Sometimes you give your younger self points
for good taste, even if your taste has moved on.
The
first grown-up narrative poem that I read by choice and for pleasure, and not
because some teacher had told me to, was John Keats’ Isabella or the Pot of Basil.
I think I was about fifteen. Why this poem?
I’m not sure, but probably because it appeared in an old Collins Clear Type
edition of Keats’ poems, to which I still give shelf space. The edition was
illustrated and I was still of an age when I looked at the pictures in books
before I read the text. This poem was represented with what I now see to be a
rather crude image of Isabella weeping over her pot of basil. Anyway, it
intrigued me enough to read the poem and I did, a number of times. All 63
stanzas of ottava rima (eight lines
with three sets of crossed rhymes followed by a couplet, a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c).
I loved it.
John Keats (1795-1821)
wrote this poem when he was 23, although it was first published when he was 25.
It was therefore written before the annus
mirabilis for which he is so often praised. He adapted his story from
Boccaccio’s Decameron.
In Renaissance
Florence, Isabella loves Lorenzo and Lorenzo loves Isabella, but Isabella’s two
brothers are ambitious merchants who want their sister to make a wealthy marriage.
They disapprove of poor Lorenzo, who is their lowly employee. Therefore they
take desperate measures. Luring Lorenzo away on the pretext of taking him on a
business trip, they murder him and bury him in a forest. Returning home, they
tell Isabella that Lorenzo will be away on business for a very long time. But Isabella
has a dream in which Lorenzo’s ghost tells her how he has been murdered and
where he is buried. With a servant, Isabella hastens to the spot, uncovers the
corpse and (bizarre detail) cuts off the head, which she preserves in a pot of
the herb basil. She clings to this pot, tending it and weeping over it, so
obsessively that her brothers notice. In a moment when the pot is unguarded,
they steal it, discover its contents, and flee, knowing that their crime has
been discovered. The poem ends with Isabella, unhinged, lamenting that her
beloved basil pot has been taken from her.
When I first
read this poem, I was puzzled that Isabella did not confront her brothers with
their crime and took such an eccentric course in honouring her dead lover. I
think I get it now. She is a powerless young woman whose life is controlled by
her brothers and whose word (as a woman) wouldn’t be believed in a law court.
She is also not focused on revenge (or justice) but on love and lament.
And besides,
John Keats was following Boccaccio’s brutal little story.
Ahead of writing
this notice, I checked out Boccaccio’s story (Decameron, Fourth Day, 5th story) in the two
translations of the Decameron that
sit on my shelves. Boccaccio’s story is set specifically in Messina (in Sicily)
and the basil plant comes from Salerno. Lorenzo is Lorenzo, but the girl is
called throughout Lisabetta, not Isabella. She has three brothers, not two. The
story is curt and does not dally over the fine feelings of the lovers. In both
the (1903) Everyman’s library translation by J.R. Rigg, and the (1972) Penguin
translation by G.H.McWilliam, it runs to a mere four pages. It is a sharp
little anecdote, emphasising horror and the grotesque. By
the way, Isabella/ Lisabetta’s final lament over her basil pot is based on a
Sicilian folk song from before Boccaccio’s time, and it may have been the folk
song that inspired Boccaccio to write his tale.
While he does
indeed tell the same story that Boccaccio told, John Keats changes some minor
points – he shifts the setting to somewhere near Florence and the River Arno
(Stanza 27) and gives Isabella only two brothers. More important, Keats shifts
the emphasis from pure horror to the feelings of the lovers for each other, and
to the inwardness of Isabella’s grief. He also interpolates things that do not
concern Boccaccio - such as a long
condemnation of Isabella’s brothers (Stanzas 14, 15, 16) and apostrophes
to Melancholy (Stanzas 55 and 61). Therefore, while staying true to Boccaccio’s
narrative framework, the poem becomes a (sometimes uneasy) mixture of Romantic
passion and sentiment with grotesque horror.
Now what, in this Romantic poem, appealed
to a teenaged reader?
The
poem opens thus:
“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.” (Stanza 1)
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.” (Stanza 1)
Immediately we
know from the word “palmer” (pilgrim)
that the poem will have an exalted view of romantic love as religious
experience. Yes, that is the way adolescents often see it. But there is also
the issue of sex. Isabella and Lorenzo ache to consummate their love sexually:
“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.” (Stanza 5)
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.” (Stanza 5)
Lorenzo wails “I cannot live / Another night, and not my
passion shrive.” (Stanza 8), again making sexual love a religious
experience. “Shrive” means to have
your sins cleansed by confession. In effect, Lorenzo is saying “I will relieve myself of my passion in your
body, just as a penitent relieves himself of sins in the confessional”. Unfulfilled
sexual drives – that was another major attraction to the teenaged male reader,
who spent much time speaking to his pillow.
And then the poem speaks to
adolescent angst - the persistent sense
that “My family are controlling me! I’m
not allowed to do what I want” etc. I remember, as a teenager, lingering
over the stanza in which the ghost of Lorenzo departs, leaving Isabella to her
lonely bed:
“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…” (Stanza 41)
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…” (Stanza 41)
That phenomenon of lying awake in
the darkness and seeing the “spangly
gloom” dancing before my eyes – yes, I spent many teenage nights in that
state.
I am not looking at the poem now
solely to rebuke my teenage self. I can appreciate in it much of Keats’ real
skill. I note, for example, the way he is focusing on
Isabella and her sorrow, and hence does not dwell on grisly details of
Lorenzo’s murder. “So the two brothers
and their murder’d man / Rode past fair Florence…” (Stanza 27) says one
admired line, deliberately taking any suspense out of what the two brothers are
going to do. Of the actual murder all we get is “There was Lorenzo slain and buried in, / There in that forest did his
great love cease.” (Stanza 28). I also note flashes of psychological
acuteness. Romantic and sexual love may be exalted in the poem as a
quasi-religious phenomenon, but it always has its selfish side. When Isabella
first learns that Lorenzo is not coming back (but before she knows that he is
murdered), she laments first of all “pleasures
not to be”; but then Keats comments “Selfishness,
Love’s cousin, held not long / Its fiery vigil in her single breast”.
(Stanza 31).
“Selfishness, Love’s cousin”? In other
words, in matters of sexual attraction, self-gratification is also a reality,
as strong as an idealisation of the beloved.
Yet having noted
the self-evident skill of a great poet, there are those points where the mature
eye can see the joins. Keats eschews the “horror” aspect when he narrates
Lorenzo’s murder but – for all his focus on Isabella’s anguish – he can’t
forbear to drop in some gruesome Gothick elements. When Lorenzo’s ghost appears
to Isabella, Keats suggests the awful decay of the murdered man’s corpse and
the unearthliness of its voice (Stanzas 35, 36, 37). And hints of the true
Gothick intermesh with the sweetly (or passionately) Romantic, when Isabella
finds the forest grave where her lover is buried:
“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 skull, 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.” (stanza 45)
And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see skull, 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.” (stanza 45)
Then there are the three consecutive
stanzas that stick out like a sore thumb as a hindrance to the poem’s narrative
drive. Keats denounces Isabella’s rapacious mercantile
brothers in words that are among the most impassioned in the poem:
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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?” (Stanzas 14, 15, 16)
Is this the
Romantic poet reacting against the industry and early capitalism that was overwhelming
England in his own day? In the “industrial revolution” the Romantic (and
therefore radical) young Keats forgets his aim and goes off topic. After doing
so, he asks Boccaccio’s pardon: “O
eloquent and famed Boccaccio! / Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon….
Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale / Shall move on soberly as it is
meet…” (Stanzas 19 and 20) But the damage has still been done. There is a similar sense of the material going
over-the-top and getting out of the poet’s control in Keats’ apostrophes to
Melancholy (Stanzas 55 and 61). And, alas, there are stylistic breakdowns into
bathos, as when Isabella is first told that Lorenzo
will not return for a long time, and Keats slaps us with these limp lines: “To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow,
/ And the next day will be a day of sorrow.” (Stanza 29). The rather too
hasty dismissal of Isabella’s brothers from the story is also bathetic (Stanza
60); though I am still in two minds as to whether the poem’s last words are: “O cruelty, / To steal my Basil-pot away from
me!” (Stanza 63)
At least I can
salute Keats’ fruitful ambiguity in the way he depicts Isabella’s obsessive
care of her basil plant:
“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.” (Stanza 53)
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.” (Stanza 53)
Is
this the epitome of grief and romantic love, or is it mania – a collapse into
madness and a separation from the realities of the world?
I
am, of course, both arrogant and presumptuous to criticise a canonical poet
like this – but I am consoled by the knowledge that Keats would have agreed
with me. Keats was “dissatisfied
with the poem before he had ended it” says Robert Gittings, the Keats
scholar and biographer. Keats had to be argued into letting it be published in
the 1820 volume which contained his more mature poetry. Keats wrote: “I will give you a few reasons why I shall
persist in not publishing The Pot of Basil. It is too smokeable. I can
get it smoak‘d at the Carpenters shaving chimney much more cheaply. There is
too much inexperience of life, and simplicity of knowledge in it. […]. Isabella
is what I should call were I a reviewer
‘A weak-sided Poem’ with an amusing sober-sadness about it.” The word
“smokeable” was one Keats often used to mean ill-formed, unfocused, cloudy,
immature and irresolute. As a poet who developed very fast, Keats himself saw Isabella or the Pot of
Basil as not being worthy of his more developed poetic
skill.
So how do I
conclude this inquisition of one of Keats’ lesser works? Of course it is not
his greatest. As a narrative poem, it does not have the power of The Eve of Saint Agnes or even the
defective Lamia (though – Lord save
us – it is not as tedious as Endymion).
Certainly it is nowhere near the great odes for which Keats is best remembered.
But it is still an excellent poem for a teenager to fall in love with, bathos,
overblown apostrophes and all. You are lying in your single bed
yearning for the opposite sex. What could console you better than this sad tale
of lovers’ despair – which also tells
you how rotten some grown-ups can be?
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It’s a very curious fact that John
Keats’ immature and imperfect poem became a favourite with Pre-Raphaelite and
other Victorian-era painters. Look up the title Isabella or the Pot of Basil on Google Images and you will find
literally dozens of nineteenth century paintings on the subject, most of them
depicting Isabella weeping over her basil pot.
Curiously, the first and probably
most famous painting derived from the poem does not depict the pot of basil. It
is John Everett Millais’ Isabella
(also known as Lorenzo and Isabella) exhibited
in 1849. It shows the young lovers at the dinner table opposite Isabella’s
brothers and it is heavy with symbolism. Lorenzo hands Isabella a cut blood
orange on a plate – a premonition of the later decapitation of his corpse.
The most famous depiction of Isabella with the basil
pot is by another Pre-Raphaelite. It is William Holman Hunt’s 1868 painting
which I had the pleasure of seeing in the Laing Art Gallery in
Newcastle-on-Tyne in 2014. In fact it was seeing this that made me go back and
read the poem for the first time in years.
In 1879, the painter John Melhuish
Strudwick took another tack. He did not show Isabella weeping over the basil
pot, but showed her (remarkably languid and composed, I can’t help thinking)
discovering that the pot has been stolen, while through the window behind her
we can see her brothers sneaking away with it.
And
then there is the depiction of Isabella and her pot by the late 19th/early
20th century artist George Henry Grenville Manton. This is the one heaviest
with the oblivion of grief – Isabella is clad in black and her eyes are closed
as if grief has exhausted her.
By
the time Manton produced his version, Keats’ poem was already being produced in
de luxe illustrated editions, like
the one William Morris’s disciple W.B.MacDougall produced in 1898.
It is
possible that some of these artists saw themselves as illustrating Boccaccio’s
story rather than Keats’ poem. But I doubt that there would have been so many
depictions of the story if Keats had not written his poem. My cynical side
notes, too, that Victorians would have been happier to illustrate this story
than most of the other tales that fill the Decameron.
After all, anecdotes of monks bonking nuns and priests bonking penitents would
not have been able to be exhibited in a Victorain gallery. And yet, of course,
the image of a grieving woman clinging to a solid upright thing has its own
erotic charge, as I’m sure many of these artists fully understood.
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