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Keats’s Isabella: the Pot of Basil
After reading Isabella or the Pot of Basil, we found that Keats had made use of many elements similar to those used in his other work. ... This paper’s aim, therefore, is to explore these points: mysterious and supernatural elements, mythical element, the subject of love and sentimentality, the concept of melancholy, and Keats’s and our personal opinion toward the poem respectively.
Mysterious and Supernatural elements:
Like some of the romantic poets, Keats was interested in the irrational, mysterious, and supernatural world of distant past. This is also true for Isabella, which, despite its mythical element, contains a number of mysterious and supernatural elements. Murder, fake vision, dreams, and strange actions of Isabella all contribute to this poem along with the dull and gloomy atmosphere. ... Some of these devices of Keats are similar to that of his other poems. ... In Isabella, the lovers were kept apart but they dreamed of each other at night. Moreover, when Lorenzo was murdered, his spirit came to visit Isabella in her dream and bid her to go find his body. ...
However, the unordinary actions in Isabella are in fact quite distinct from Keats’s other work, though of the same themes. Those are series of strange events occurred after Isabella pined for her love and in a vision saw the spot where Lorenzo had been killed. First, Isabella, along with her aged maid, went to the forest in search of her lover’s grove and dug his body up. ...
Mythical Element:
“Isabella” is a narrative poem, and at the same time, it employs some mythical elements and even is a myth itself.
Like many of Keats’s poems that are inspired by myths, Isabella was a tale firstly told by the fourteenth-century Italian author, Boccaccio. This tale, firstly named The Decameron was adapted and rewrote into Isabella. In Keats’s version, the story is told in the tale-like way as it has, as mentioned, such an extremely gloomy atmosphere and series of supernatural phenomena, which are the important elements of myths. ... In addition, at the end of the poem, we get to know that the story of Isabella and Lorenzo is a myth itself, as it is told to people from generation to generation in the form of a ditty: “. ... 501-502)
By these reasons, we may regard Isabella as a myth and as one of many poems Keats narrated with the mythical element.
Love and Sentimentality:
Since Isabella’s main theme is about love, several events are closely concerned with sentimentality. Although some of Keats’s poems, for example, the Eves of St. Agnes or La Bell Dame San Merci, involved with this subject, the aspect of love presented in Isabella is quite different.
Approximate Word count = 2224
Approximate Pages = 8.9
(250 words per page double spaced)
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