Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame

by Sidney Colvin

Passing from the minor to the major achievements of the time, the earliest, and to my mind the finest, of these is Isabella or the Pot of Basil. During the writing of Endymion, Keats had intended his next effort to be on the lofty classic and symbolic theme of the dethronement of Hyperion and the Titans and the accession of Apollo and the Olympians. But certain reading and talk in the Hunt circle having diverted him from this purpose for a while, and made him take up the idea of a volume of metrical tales from Boccaccio to be written jointly by himself and Reynolds, he chose the tale of the Pot of Basil (the fifth of the fourth day in the Decameron), made a sudden beginning at it before he left Hampstead at the end of February, (1819), and finished it at Teignmouth in the course of April. As an appropriate vehicle for an Italian story he took the Italian ottava rima or stanza of eight. Several of the earlier English poets had used this metre: Keats’s main model for it was doubtless Edward Fairfax, who, following other Elizabethan translators, had in his fine version from Tasso, Godfrey of Bulloigne, done much more than any of his predecessors towards suppling and perfecting its treatment in English. Since then it had been little employed in our serious poetry, but had lately been brilliantly revived for flippant and satiric uses, after later Italian models, by Hookham Frere and Byron. Keats goes over the heads of these direct to Fairfax, and in certain points at least, in variety of pause and cadence and subtle adaptation of verbal music to emotional effect, by a good deal outdoes even that excellent master.[3] Of course it is of the essence of his treatment to avoid, in the closing couplet of the stanza, the special effect of witty snap and suddenness which fits it so well for the purpose of satire.

Every one knows the story: how a maiden of Messina (Keats chooses to transfer the scene to Florence), living in the house of her merchant brothers, in secret loves one of their clerks: how her brothers, discovering her secret, take out her lover to the forest and there slay and bury him: how his ghost appearing to her in a dream reveals his fate and burial place: how she hastens thither with her nurse, digs till she finds the corpse and having found it carries home the head and sets it in a pot of basil, or sweet marjoram, which she cherishes and waters with her tears until her brothers take it from her, whereupon she pines away and dies.

Boccaccio tells this story with that admirable combination of straightforward conciseness and finished grace which characterizes his mature prose. Keats in his poem romantically amplifies and embroiders it. In his way of doing so we can trace the influence of Chaucer, with whose Troilus and Criseyde, that miracle of detailed, long-drawn, yet ever human and rarely tedious narrative, he was by this time familiar. Keats, while avoiding Chaucer’s prolixity, diversifies his tale with invocations to Love and to the Muses, with apostrophes to the reader and ejaculatory comments on the events, entirely in Chaucer’s manner: only whereas Chaucer relegates the more part of such matter to the ‘proems’ of his several books, Keats, having plunged into the thick of the story in his first line, finds room for his apostrophes and invocations in the course of the narrative itself. Most critics have taken the view that this is evidence of weak or immature art. To my mind this is not so: the pauses thus introduced are never long enough to hold up the flow and interest of the narrative, while they afford welcome rests to the attention, pleasant changes from a too sustained narrative construction, with consequent beautiful and happy modulations in the movement of the verse.

One of these invocations—invocation and apology together—is to Boccaccio himself, disowning all idea of improving the tale and defining the poet’s attempt as made but to honour him,—

To stead thee as a verse in English tongue, An echo of thee in the north-wind sung.

The definition is exact. The revived spirit of English romantic poetry breathes in every line of the verse, and as in Endymion, so here, the southern setting is conceived as though it were English. ‘So the two brothers and their murder’d man’ (the force of the anticipatory epithet has been celebrated by every critic since Lamb)—

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 Keep head against the freshets.

Another such criticized ‘digression’ tells of the toilers yoked in all quarters of the world to the service of these avaricious merchant brothers. In calling up their sufferings Keats for a moment strikes an unexpected verbal echo from the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden.[4] Dryden, telling of the monopolies of the Dutch in the East India trade, had written,—

For them alone the Heav’ns had kindly heat, In eastern quarries ripening precious dew: For them the Idumean balm did sweat, And in hot Ceilon spicy forests grew.