These are the stanzas of which Lamb says,
'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and
moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser'--and again,
after an appreciation of _Lamia_, whose fairy splendours are 'for
younger impressibilities', he reverts to them, saying: 'To _us_ an
ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur
again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of
basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we
think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it
would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light
to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies,
rather than acknowledge she is fair.
'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and
moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser'--and again,
after an appreciation of _Lamia_, whose fairy splendours are 'for
younger impressibilities', he reverts to them, saying: 'To _us_ an
ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur
again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of
basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we
think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it
would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light
to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies,
rather than acknowledge she is fair.
Keats
159.
_stead thee_, do thee service.
l. 168. _olive-trees. _ In which (through the oil they yield) a great
part of the wealth of the Italians lies.
PAGE 60. l. 174. _Cut . . . bone. _ This is not only a vivid way of
describing the banishment of all their natural pity. It also, by the
metaphor used, gives us a sort of premonitory shudder as at Lorenzo's
death. Indeed, in that moment the murder is, to all intents and
purposes, done. In stanza xxvii they are described as riding 'with their
murder'd man'.
PAGE 61. ll. 187-8. _ere . . . eglantine. _ The sun, drying up the dew
drop by drop from the sweet-briar is pictured as passing beads along a
string, as the Roman Catholics do when they say their prayers.
PAGE 62. l. 209. _their . . . man. _ Cf. l. 174, note. Notice the
extraordinary vividness of the picture here--the quiet rural scene and
the intrusion of human passion with the reflection in the clear water of
the pale murderers, sick with suspense, and the unsuspecting victim,
full of glowing life.
l. 212. _bream_, a kind of fish found in lakes and deep water. Obviously
Keats was not an angler.
_freshets_, little streams of fresh water.
PAGE 63. l. 217. Notice the reticence with which the mere fact of the
murder is stated--no details given. Keats wants the prevailing feeling
to be one of pity rather than of horror.
ll. 219-20. _Ah . . . loneliness. _ We perpetually come upon this old
belief--that the souls of the murdered cannot rest in peace. Cf.
_Hamlet_, I. v. 8, &c.
l. 221. _break-covert . . . sin. _ The blood-hounds employed for tracking
down a murderer will find him under any concealment, and never rest till
he is found. So restless is the soul of the victim.
l. 222. _They . . . water. _ That water which had reflected the three
faces as they went across.
_tease_, torment.
l. 223. _convulsed spur_, they spurred their horses violently and
uncertainly, scarce knowing what they did.
l. 224. _Each richer . . . murderer. _ This is what they have gained by
their deed--the guilt of murder--that is all.
l. 229. _stifling_: partly literal, since the widow's weed is
close-wrapping and voluminous--partly metaphorical, since the acceptance
of fate stifles complaint.
l. 230. _accursed bands. _ So long as a man hopes he is not free, but at
the mercy of continual imaginings and fresh disappointments. When hope
is laid aside, fear and disappointment go with it.
PAGE 64. l. 241. _Selfishness, Love's cousin. _ For the two aspects of
love, as a selfish and unselfish passion, see Blake's two poems, _Love
seeketh only self to please_, and, _Love seeketh not itself to please_.
l. 242. _single breast_, one-thoughted, being full of love for Lorenzo.
PAGE 65. ll. 249 seq. Cf. Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_.
l. 252. _roundelay_, a dance in a circle.
l. 259. _Striving . . . itself. _ Her distrust of her brothers is shown
in her effort not to betray her fears to them.
_dungeon climes. _ Wherever it is, it is a prison which keeps him from
her. Cf. _Hamlet_, II. ii. 250-4.
l. 262. _Hinnom's Vale_, the valley of Moloch's sacrifices, _Paradise
Lost_, i. 392-405.
l. 264. _snowy shroud_, a truly prophetic dream.
PAGE 66. ll. 267 seq. These comparisons help us to realize her
experience as sharp anguish, rousing her from the lethargy of despair,
and endowing her for a brief space with almost supernatural energy and
willpower.
PAGE 67. l. 286. _palsied Druid. _ The Druids, or priests of ancient
Britain, are always pictured as old men with long beards. The conception
of such an old man, tremblingly trying to get music from a broken harp,
adds to the pathos and mystery of the vision.
l. 288. _Like . . . among. _ Take this line word by word, and see how
many different ideas go to create the incomparably ghostly effect.
ll. 289 seq. Horror is skilfully kept from this picture and only tragedy
left. The horror is for the eyes of his murderers, not for his love.
l. 292. _unthread . . . woof. _ His narration and explanation of what has
gone before is pictured as the disentangling of woven threads.
l. 293. _darken'd. _ In many senses, since their crime was (1) concealed
from Isabella, (2) darkly evil, (3) done in the darkness of the wood.
PAGE 68. ll. 305 seq. The whole sound of this stanza is that of a faint
and far-away echo.
l. 308. _knelling. _ Every sound is like a death-bell to him.
PAGE 69. l. 316. _That paleness. _ Her paleness showing her great love
for him; and, moreover, indicating that they will soon be reunited.
l. 317. _bright abyss_, the bright hollow of heaven.
l. 322. _The atom . . . turmoil. _ Every one must know the sensation of
looking into the darkness, straining one's eyes, until the darkness
itself seems to be composed of moving atoms. The experience with which
Keats, in the next lines, compares it, is, we are told, a common
experience in the early stages of consumption.
PAGE 70. l. 334. _school'd my infancy. _ She was as a child in her
ignorance of evil, and he has taught her the hard lesson that our misery
is not always due to the dealings of a blind fate, but sometimes to the
deliberate crime and cruelty of those whom we have trusted.
l. 344. _forest-hearse. _ To Isabella the whole forest is but the
receptacle of her lover's corpse.
PAGE 71. l. 347. _champaign_, country. We can picture Isabel, as they
'creep' along, furtively glancing round, and then producing her knife
with a smile so terrible that the old nurse can only fear that she is
delirious, as her sudden vigour would also suggest.
PAGE 72. st. xlvi-xlviii.
These are the stanzas of which Lamb says,
'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and
moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser'--and again,
after an appreciation of _Lamia_, whose fairy splendours are 'for
younger impressibilities', he reverts to them, saying: 'To _us_ an
ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur
again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of
basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we
think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it
would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light
to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies,
rather than acknowledge she is fair. '--_The New Times_, July 19, 1820.
l. 361. _fresh-thrown mould_, a corroboration of her fears. Mr. Colvin
has pointed out how the horror is throughout relieved by the beauty of
the images called up by the similes, e. g. 'a crystal well,' 'a native
lily of the dell. '
l. 370. _Her silk . . . phantasies_, i. e. which she had embroidered
fancifully for him.
PAGE 73. l. 385. _wormy circumstance_, ghastly detail. Keats envies the
un-self-conscious simplicity of the old ballad-writers in treating such
a theme as this, and bids the reader turn to Boccaccio, whose
description of the scene he cannot hope to rival. Boccaccio writes: 'Nor
had she dug long before she found the body of her hapless lover, whereon
as yet there was no trace of corruption or decay; and thus she saw
without any manner of doubt that her vision was true. And so, saddest of
women, knowing that she might not bewail him there, she would gladly, if
she could, have carried away the body and given it more honourable
sepulture elsewhere; but as she might not do so, she took a knife, and,
as best she could, severed the head from the trunk, and wrapped it in a
napkin and laid it in the lap of the maid; and having covered the rest
of the corpse with earth, she left the spot, having been seen by none,
and went home. '
PAGE 74. l. 393. _Persean sword. _ The sword of sharpness given to
Perseus by Hermes, with which he cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa,
a monster with the head of a woman, and snaky locks, the sight of whom
turned those who looked on her into stone. Perseus escaped by looking
only at her reflection in his shield.
l. 406. _chilly_: tears, not passionate, but of cold despair.
PAGE 75. l. 410. _pluck'd in Araby. _ Cf. Lady Macbeth, 'All the perfumes
of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,' _Macbeth_, V. ii. 55.
l. 412. _serpent-pipe_, twisted pipe.
l. 416. _Sweet Basil_, a fragrant aromatic plant.
ll. 417-20. The repetition makes us feel the monotony of her days and
nights of grief.
PAGE 76. l. 432. _leafits_, leaflets, little leaves. An old botanical
term, but obsolete in Keats's time. Coleridge uses it in l. 65 of 'The
Nightingale' in _Lyrical Ballads_. In later editions he altered it to
'leaflets'.
l. 436. _Lethean_, in Hades, the dark underworld of the dead. Compare
the conception of melancholy in the _Ode on Melancholy_, where it is
said to neighbour joy. Contrast Stanza lxi.
l. 439. _cypress_, dark trees which in Italy are always planted in
cemeteries. They stand by Keats's own grave.
PAGE 77. l. 442. _Melpomene_, the Muse of tragedy.
l. 451. _Baalites of pelf_, worshippers of ill-gotten gains.
l. 453. _elf_, man. The word is used in this sense by Spenser in _The
Faerie Queene_.
PAGE 78. l. 467. _chapel-shrift_, confession. Cf. l. 64.
ll. 469-72. _And when . . . hair. _ The pathos of this picture is
intensified by its suggestions of the wife- and mother-hood which Isabel
can now never know. Cf. st. xlvii, where the idea is still more
beautifully suggested.
PAGE 79. l. 475. _vile . . . spot. _ The one touch of descriptive
horror--powerful in its reticence.
PAGE 80. l. 489. _on . . . things. _ Her love and her hope is with the
dead rather than with the living.
l. 492. _lorn voice. _ Cf. st. xxxv. She is approaching her lover. Note
that in each case the metaphor is of a stringed instrument.
l. 493. _Pilgrim in his wanderings. _ Cf. st. i, 'a young palmer in
Love's eye. '
l. 503. _burthen_, refrain. Cf. _Tempest_, I. ii. Ariel's songs.
NOTES ON THE EVE OF ST. AGNES.
See Introduction to _Isabella_ and _The Eve of St. Agnes_, p. 212.
St. Agnes was a martyr of the Christian Church who was beheaded just
outside Rome in 304 because she refused to marry a Pagan, holding
herself to be a bride of Christ. She was only 13--so small and slender
that the smallest fetters they could find slipped over her little wrists
and fell to the ground. But they stripped, tortured, and killed her. A
week after her death her parents dreamed that they saw her in glory with
a white lamb, the sign of purity, beside her. Hence she is always
pictured with lambs (as her name signifies), and to the place of her
martyrdom two lambs are yearly taken on the anniversary and blessed.
Then their wool is cut off and woven by the nuns into the archbishop's
cloak, or pallium (see l. 70).
For the legend connected with the Eve of the Saint's anniversary, to
which Keats refers, see st. vi.
_Metre. _ That of the _Faerie Queene_.
PAGE 83. ll. 5-6. _told His rosary. _ Cf. _Isabella_, ll. 87-8.
l. 8. _without a death. _ The 'flight to heaven' obscures the simile of
the incense, and his breath is thought of as a departing soul.
PAGE 84. l. 12. _meagre, barefoot, wan. _ Such a compression of a
description into three bare epithets is frequent in Keats's poetry. He
shows his marvellous power in the unerring choice of adjective; and
their enumeration in this way has, from its very simplicity, an
extraordinary force.
l. 15. _purgatorial rails_, rails which enclose them in a place of
torture.
l. 16. _dumb orat'ries. _ The transference of the adjective from person
to place helps to give us the mysterious sense of life in inanimate
things. Cf. _Hyperion_, iii. 8; _Ode to a Nightingale_, l. 66.
l. 22. _already . . . rung. _ He was dead to the world. But this hint
should also prepare us for the conclusion of the poem.
PAGE 85. l. 31. _'gan to chide. _ l. 32. _ready with their pride. _ l. 34.
_ever eager-eyed. _ l. 36. _with hair . . . breasts.
l. 168. _olive-trees. _ In which (through the oil they yield) a great
part of the wealth of the Italians lies.
PAGE 60. l. 174. _Cut . . . bone. _ This is not only a vivid way of
describing the banishment of all their natural pity. It also, by the
metaphor used, gives us a sort of premonitory shudder as at Lorenzo's
death. Indeed, in that moment the murder is, to all intents and
purposes, done. In stanza xxvii they are described as riding 'with their
murder'd man'.
PAGE 61. ll. 187-8. _ere . . . eglantine. _ The sun, drying up the dew
drop by drop from the sweet-briar is pictured as passing beads along a
string, as the Roman Catholics do when they say their prayers.
PAGE 62. l. 209. _their . . . man. _ Cf. l. 174, note. Notice the
extraordinary vividness of the picture here--the quiet rural scene and
the intrusion of human passion with the reflection in the clear water of
the pale murderers, sick with suspense, and the unsuspecting victim,
full of glowing life.
l. 212. _bream_, a kind of fish found in lakes and deep water. Obviously
Keats was not an angler.
_freshets_, little streams of fresh water.
PAGE 63. l. 217. Notice the reticence with which the mere fact of the
murder is stated--no details given. Keats wants the prevailing feeling
to be one of pity rather than of horror.
ll. 219-20. _Ah . . . loneliness. _ We perpetually come upon this old
belief--that the souls of the murdered cannot rest in peace. Cf.
_Hamlet_, I. v. 8, &c.
l. 221. _break-covert . . . sin. _ The blood-hounds employed for tracking
down a murderer will find him under any concealment, and never rest till
he is found. So restless is the soul of the victim.
l. 222. _They . . . water. _ That water which had reflected the three
faces as they went across.
_tease_, torment.
l. 223. _convulsed spur_, they spurred their horses violently and
uncertainly, scarce knowing what they did.
l. 224. _Each richer . . . murderer. _ This is what they have gained by
their deed--the guilt of murder--that is all.
l. 229. _stifling_: partly literal, since the widow's weed is
close-wrapping and voluminous--partly metaphorical, since the acceptance
of fate stifles complaint.
l. 230. _accursed bands. _ So long as a man hopes he is not free, but at
the mercy of continual imaginings and fresh disappointments. When hope
is laid aside, fear and disappointment go with it.
PAGE 64. l. 241. _Selfishness, Love's cousin. _ For the two aspects of
love, as a selfish and unselfish passion, see Blake's two poems, _Love
seeketh only self to please_, and, _Love seeketh not itself to please_.
l. 242. _single breast_, one-thoughted, being full of love for Lorenzo.
PAGE 65. ll. 249 seq. Cf. Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_.
l. 252. _roundelay_, a dance in a circle.
l. 259. _Striving . . . itself. _ Her distrust of her brothers is shown
in her effort not to betray her fears to them.
_dungeon climes. _ Wherever it is, it is a prison which keeps him from
her. Cf. _Hamlet_, II. ii. 250-4.
l. 262. _Hinnom's Vale_, the valley of Moloch's sacrifices, _Paradise
Lost_, i. 392-405.
l. 264. _snowy shroud_, a truly prophetic dream.
PAGE 66. ll. 267 seq. These comparisons help us to realize her
experience as sharp anguish, rousing her from the lethargy of despair,
and endowing her for a brief space with almost supernatural energy and
willpower.
PAGE 67. l. 286. _palsied Druid. _ The Druids, or priests of ancient
Britain, are always pictured as old men with long beards. The conception
of such an old man, tremblingly trying to get music from a broken harp,
adds to the pathos and mystery of the vision.
l. 288. _Like . . . among. _ Take this line word by word, and see how
many different ideas go to create the incomparably ghostly effect.
ll. 289 seq. Horror is skilfully kept from this picture and only tragedy
left. The horror is for the eyes of his murderers, not for his love.
l. 292. _unthread . . . woof. _ His narration and explanation of what has
gone before is pictured as the disentangling of woven threads.
l. 293. _darken'd. _ In many senses, since their crime was (1) concealed
from Isabella, (2) darkly evil, (3) done in the darkness of the wood.
PAGE 68. ll. 305 seq. The whole sound of this stanza is that of a faint
and far-away echo.
l. 308. _knelling. _ Every sound is like a death-bell to him.
PAGE 69. l. 316. _That paleness. _ Her paleness showing her great love
for him; and, moreover, indicating that they will soon be reunited.
l. 317. _bright abyss_, the bright hollow of heaven.
l. 322. _The atom . . . turmoil. _ Every one must know the sensation of
looking into the darkness, straining one's eyes, until the darkness
itself seems to be composed of moving atoms. The experience with which
Keats, in the next lines, compares it, is, we are told, a common
experience in the early stages of consumption.
PAGE 70. l. 334. _school'd my infancy. _ She was as a child in her
ignorance of evil, and he has taught her the hard lesson that our misery
is not always due to the dealings of a blind fate, but sometimes to the
deliberate crime and cruelty of those whom we have trusted.
l. 344. _forest-hearse. _ To Isabella the whole forest is but the
receptacle of her lover's corpse.
PAGE 71. l. 347. _champaign_, country. We can picture Isabel, as they
'creep' along, furtively glancing round, and then producing her knife
with a smile so terrible that the old nurse can only fear that she is
delirious, as her sudden vigour would also suggest.
PAGE 72. st. xlvi-xlviii.
These are the stanzas of which Lamb says,
'there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and
moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser'--and again,
after an appreciation of _Lamia_, whose fairy splendours are 'for
younger impressibilities', he reverts to them, saying: 'To _us_ an
ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur
again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of
basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we
think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it
would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light
to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies,
rather than acknowledge she is fair. '--_The New Times_, July 19, 1820.
l. 361. _fresh-thrown mould_, a corroboration of her fears. Mr. Colvin
has pointed out how the horror is throughout relieved by the beauty of
the images called up by the similes, e. g. 'a crystal well,' 'a native
lily of the dell. '
l. 370. _Her silk . . . phantasies_, i. e. which she had embroidered
fancifully for him.
PAGE 73. l. 385. _wormy circumstance_, ghastly detail. Keats envies the
un-self-conscious simplicity of the old ballad-writers in treating such
a theme as this, and bids the reader turn to Boccaccio, whose
description of the scene he cannot hope to rival. Boccaccio writes: 'Nor
had she dug long before she found the body of her hapless lover, whereon
as yet there was no trace of corruption or decay; and thus she saw
without any manner of doubt that her vision was true. And so, saddest of
women, knowing that she might not bewail him there, she would gladly, if
she could, have carried away the body and given it more honourable
sepulture elsewhere; but as she might not do so, she took a knife, and,
as best she could, severed the head from the trunk, and wrapped it in a
napkin and laid it in the lap of the maid; and having covered the rest
of the corpse with earth, she left the spot, having been seen by none,
and went home. '
PAGE 74. l. 393. _Persean sword. _ The sword of sharpness given to
Perseus by Hermes, with which he cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa,
a monster with the head of a woman, and snaky locks, the sight of whom
turned those who looked on her into stone. Perseus escaped by looking
only at her reflection in his shield.
l. 406. _chilly_: tears, not passionate, but of cold despair.
PAGE 75. l. 410. _pluck'd in Araby. _ Cf. Lady Macbeth, 'All the perfumes
of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,' _Macbeth_, V. ii. 55.
l. 412. _serpent-pipe_, twisted pipe.
l. 416. _Sweet Basil_, a fragrant aromatic plant.
ll. 417-20. The repetition makes us feel the monotony of her days and
nights of grief.
PAGE 76. l. 432. _leafits_, leaflets, little leaves. An old botanical
term, but obsolete in Keats's time. Coleridge uses it in l. 65 of 'The
Nightingale' in _Lyrical Ballads_. In later editions he altered it to
'leaflets'.
l. 436. _Lethean_, in Hades, the dark underworld of the dead. Compare
the conception of melancholy in the _Ode on Melancholy_, where it is
said to neighbour joy. Contrast Stanza lxi.
l. 439. _cypress_, dark trees which in Italy are always planted in
cemeteries. They stand by Keats's own grave.
PAGE 77. l. 442. _Melpomene_, the Muse of tragedy.
l. 451. _Baalites of pelf_, worshippers of ill-gotten gains.
l. 453. _elf_, man. The word is used in this sense by Spenser in _The
Faerie Queene_.
PAGE 78. l. 467. _chapel-shrift_, confession. Cf. l. 64.
ll. 469-72. _And when . . . hair. _ The pathos of this picture is
intensified by its suggestions of the wife- and mother-hood which Isabel
can now never know. Cf. st. xlvii, where the idea is still more
beautifully suggested.
PAGE 79. l. 475. _vile . . . spot. _ The one touch of descriptive
horror--powerful in its reticence.
PAGE 80. l. 489. _on . . . things. _ Her love and her hope is with the
dead rather than with the living.
l. 492. _lorn voice. _ Cf. st. xxxv. She is approaching her lover. Note
that in each case the metaphor is of a stringed instrument.
l. 493. _Pilgrim in his wanderings. _ Cf. st. i, 'a young palmer in
Love's eye. '
l. 503. _burthen_, refrain. Cf. _Tempest_, I. ii. Ariel's songs.
NOTES ON THE EVE OF ST. AGNES.
See Introduction to _Isabella_ and _The Eve of St. Agnes_, p. 212.
St. Agnes was a martyr of the Christian Church who was beheaded just
outside Rome in 304 because she refused to marry a Pagan, holding
herself to be a bride of Christ. She was only 13--so small and slender
that the smallest fetters they could find slipped over her little wrists
and fell to the ground. But they stripped, tortured, and killed her. A
week after her death her parents dreamed that they saw her in glory with
a white lamb, the sign of purity, beside her. Hence she is always
pictured with lambs (as her name signifies), and to the place of her
martyrdom two lambs are yearly taken on the anniversary and blessed.
Then their wool is cut off and woven by the nuns into the archbishop's
cloak, or pallium (see l. 70).
For the legend connected with the Eve of the Saint's anniversary, to
which Keats refers, see st. vi.
_Metre. _ That of the _Faerie Queene_.
PAGE 83. ll. 5-6. _told His rosary. _ Cf. _Isabella_, ll. 87-8.
l. 8. _without a death. _ The 'flight to heaven' obscures the simile of
the incense, and his breath is thought of as a departing soul.
PAGE 84. l. 12. _meagre, barefoot, wan. _ Such a compression of a
description into three bare epithets is frequent in Keats's poetry. He
shows his marvellous power in the unerring choice of adjective; and
their enumeration in this way has, from its very simplicity, an
extraordinary force.
l. 15. _purgatorial rails_, rails which enclose them in a place of
torture.
l. 16. _dumb orat'ries. _ The transference of the adjective from person
to place helps to give us the mysterious sense of life in inanimate
things. Cf. _Hyperion_, iii. 8; _Ode to a Nightingale_, l. 66.
l. 22. _already . . . rung. _ He was dead to the world. But this hint
should also prepare us for the conclusion of the poem.
PAGE 85. l. 31. _'gan to chide. _ l. 32. _ready with their pride. _ l. 34.
_ever eager-eyed. _ l. 36. _with hair . . . breasts.
