Numbers in parentheses refer to line
numbers of Keats’ poem; those in brackets refer to endnotes. The Italian text of “La canzone del
basilico” is appended.
With its strong appeal to those most powerful of human tastes, those for love and for violence, the bizarre story of a
lover’s head buried in a pot of basil has endured through many forms from
mythic origins through an Italian folk song, Boccaccio’s short story, Keats’
narrative poem, a remarkable series of mostly pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a
film by Pasolini.
Ultimately, the roots of the gruesome motif go back to archaic practices like the burying of offerings of human flesh to ensure fertility of which Frazer had so much to report, but here the sacrifice is futile, pathetic, hostile to the lovers’ vitality (though it does benefit the basil). The song is thus sentimental, a very human cri de coeur from a woman whose lover is gone, a reveling in loss with no vestige remaining of a faith in the magical regeneration of nature. The song, in keeping with its lyric genre, is first-person and passionate. Like narration in many old English ballads, the story is only obliquely referenced; it must be independently known to the listener or in part inferred.
Boccaccio's version in the Decameron in which the narrative of the pot of basil is story five of day four, is naturally expanded.
These two focusses – the expression of
passion and the telling of a good story – are combined and extended in Keats’
narrative poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil.” Keats had taken a hint from Hazlitt’s remark
that poetic versions of stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio “as that of
Isabella” “if executed with taste and talent, could not fail to succeed in the
present day” [1]. What is new in
Keats’ version is the construction of image systems that add both aesthetic appeal
and sharpen the thematic implications. The
tragedy of the lovers is here cast into
a dialectical structural pattern with an attractive symmetry of balancing bipolar oppositions, while their
fate is recast as a part of larger patterns of nature. Joy and sadness are the warp and weft of life
and thus of all action, all stories.
The doubling begins in the first line when
Isabella is called “fair” only to have “poor” and “simple” added, creating a
tension the entire poem seeks not to resolve, but to make into a harmony.
Love is a “malady” (4), a “sick longing” (23), a “sad plight” (25). “Love and misery” (50) coexist. This is, of course, an ancient trope, found
in Ovid, Catullus, and a thousand medieval courtly love lyrics, but Keats makes
the additional move of linking the ambivalence of love to the turning of the
seasons in nature, and, indeed, the whole narrative proceeds with the course of
the year, from a hopeful spring and a glad summer to the ominous autumn and in
the end the lethal grasp of winter. In
this way, when their love is young, it leads Lorenzo “from wintry cold” (65) to
the “ripe warmth this gracious morning time” (68). Their love is “like a lusty flower in June’s
caress” (72). Yet mythological
references to Ariadne (95) and Dido (99) remind the reader that the wheel will
turn and that there is “richest juice in poison-flowers” (104).
With “the mid days of autumn,” the “breath of Winter comes” (249-250) and “plays a roundelay/ Of death” (from 249-252) until “quick Winter chill its dying hour!” (450) Yet the cycle continues: “Love never dies, but lives” (397); the basil flourishes fed by tears and rotting flesh (LIV). The tragic muse Melpomene (442) emerges and, in an image that combines death and healing, Isabella “withers” like a palm/ Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm” (447-448).
Thus the reader has a perspective in which
all things are turning and churning. If
one has a high position on the wheel of fortune this will surely mean that one
will soon be descending, only to rise again as the vegetation does annually. Isabella’s mourning for Lorenzo is balanced
by the thriving plants in the pot.
A surprising aspect of this dialectical
view of nature and human life is the denunciation of capitalism and imperialism
in stanzas XIV-XVI. Isabella’s brothers
are not only heartless toward her and murderous toward Lorenzo, their comfort
is the product of countless workers’ suffering.
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. (117-120)
Thus wealth for
one depends on exploitation of another, just as sorrow follows joy and heat
follows cold. What had been a linear
story of a particular couple becomes in Keats’ hands an exemplum of the
instability of circumstance and the inevitable link of bipolar
oppositions. There are countless further
antinomies, from the class distinction that prejudices the brothers to Keats’
desire both to write the purest poetry and to be popular. Keats was probably hoping that Isabella would
sell well, as the story about Hazlitt’s suggesting using the Decameron as
a source suggests, just as van Gogh painted flowers with the idea that they
would be marketable, and one need not believe Shelley’s suggestion that “savage
criticism” had caused “a rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs” [2] to
recognize that the poet sought recognition and was troubled by attacks like Lockhart’s
in Blackwood’s Magazine.
In the following generations, his poem was
very widely-read and reprinted, as well as inspiring an extraordinary number of
works of visual art. A favorite topic of
the pre-Raphaelites and associated schools, representations of the story of the
pot of basil were made by a good many artists,, among them William Holman Hunt
(1868), Joseph Severn (1877), Meacci Isabella (1890), John White Alexander
(1897), John William Waterhouse (1907). Edward Reginald Frampton (1912), John
Melhuish Strudwick (1886), , Arthur Nowel (1904), Henrietta Rae (1905), W. J.
Neatby (1913), and George Henry Grenville Manton (1919), among others. These visual works are the epigones of the pot
of basil tradition, more sentimental, faux-Romantic, faux-medieval and self-consciously
aesthetic than the earlier versions.
In Hunt’s painting the elaborate decorative motifs almost overwhelm the subject matter. Her embrace of the pot with its gruesome contents is sensual and erotic in an implicit blending of love and death. Isabella’s features are those of Hunt’s recently deceased wife.
The tale has continued to attract interest
in the later twentieth century, most notably [4] in Pasolini’s film version as
the penultimate story in his 1971 The Decameron. The erotic and, indeed, the perverse elements
as well as the social criticism doubtless attracted Pasolini. He makes Lorenzo a Sicilian, and considered of
lower social status, though in Boccaccio he was a Pisan. Thus the narrative continues to survive, in
different media, styles, and themes.
The narrative of the tragic lovers and the
pot of basil has been repeatedly transformed, from archaic roots into a
melancholy folk song, expressing the poignance of lost love, like fado or blues
or, indeed, a good share of all popular music.
In Boccaccio’s hands it becomes an engaging narrative to pass an idle
evening, while Keats used it as the basis to imply a sort of cosmic dialectical
pulse in which what Wordsworth called “the still, sad music of humanity” [3] is
heard inevitably again and again. By the
late Victorian era people were using the story as the stimulus for exercising
refined taste (appreciating the luxurious patterns in Hunt’s painting) and
similarly cultivated emotions (recall Poe’s declaration of the death of a
beautiful woman as “the most poetical” of all subjects) [5]. Pasolini relished the raciness and gruesome
weirdness of the old story when he brought it to the screen. As each genre is aiming at a distinct effect,
each must be judged by different standards.
The plot line itself is clearly only one element of an ensemble that
together shape the impact of each new iteration of the pot of basil.
1. Vol 5 p. 82 The Complete Works of Wiliam
Hazlitt vol. 5, p. 82
2. Preface to Adonais.
3. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey.”
4. I know of no other feature film
retelling. Shorts have been made by
Michael Groom (2004), Cara Lawson (2017), and Madeleine Haslam
(2017).
5. “The Philosophy of Composition.”
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