Keats writes of Isabella’s brothers,—
| For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark, For them his ears gush’d blood— |
with more in the same strain, very vividly and humanly imagined, but somewhat unevenly written. On the other hand the last of the rests or interruptions in this poem is to my thinking one of its most original and admirable beauties: I mean the invocation beginning ‘O Melancholy, linger here awhile,’ repeated with lovely modulations in stanzas lv, lvi, and lxi; the poet deliberately pausing to heighten his effect as it were by an accompaniment of words chosen purely for their pathetic melody and more musical than music itself.
Keats’s way of imagining and telling the story is not less delicate than it is intense. Flaws and false notes there are: phrases, as in Endymion, too dulcet and cloying, like that which tells how the lover’s lips grew bold, ‘And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme:’ a flat line where it is most out of place—‘And Isabella did not stamp or rave:’ a far-fetched rime, as where ‘love’ and ‘grove’ draw in after them the alien idea of Lorenzo not being embalmed in ‘Indian clove.’ But such flaws, abundant in Endymion, are in Isabella rare and need to be searched for. If we want an example of the staple tissue of the poem we shall rather find it in a stanza like this:—
| 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. |
The image of love-happiness in the last couplet is as jocund and uplifting as some radiant symbolic drawing by Blake, and poetry has few things more perfect or easier in their perfection.
In a far more difficult kind, where Keats has to deal with the features of the story that might easily make for the repulsive or the macabre, he triumphs not by shirking but by sheer force of passionate imagination. ‘The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.’ This dictum of Keats can scarcely be better illustrated than by his own handling of the Isabella story. Take the vision of the murdered man appearing to the girl at night:—
| 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. 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. |
How wonderfully, in these touches, do we feel love prevailing over horror and purging the apparition of all its charnel ghastliness. When we come to the discovery and digging up of the body, Boccaccio turns the difficulty which must inhere in any realistic treatment of the theme by simply saying that it was uncorrupted; as though some kind of miracle had kept it fresh. Keats on the other hand confronts the difficulty and overcomes it. First he acknowledges how the imagination in dwelling on the dead is prone to call up images of corruptibility:—
| 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. |