Poem and Painting

John Keats’ poem "Isabella; or The Pot of Basil" was published in 1820, and the poem is about a lady, Isabella, and her lover, Lorenzo. Her brothers didn’t like them meeting together because they wanted her to marry a rich man. So they took him down and outside the city to kill him, and had they told her that they sent Lorenzo for a long business trip. When months past she was still in love with him and asked her brothers when he would return. The brothers gave her no answers; so Isabella called out to her lover asking him to return. He appeared to her in her dreams saying that he was killed by her brothers and then also told her where she could find his body. When she awoke she went outside the city to a forest and found his body. She cut off his head and put it in a pot and put basil on top. The plant was very big and made the brothers wandered what was in the pot of basil. The brothers pulled out the basil and saw the head of Lorenzo. The brothers then realized that she knew they killed Lorenzo. The brothers then took the pot and ran out to another town, never to be seen again. I believe that the poem is about a true symbol of undying love. And that undying love was showed in a painting titled Isabella and The Pot of Basil (painting showed below). That was painted in 1868 by a man named William Holman Hunt. The painting shows Isabella hugging the pot of basil that Lorenzo is buried in after he was murdered. When Hunt was drawing another painting, a scene where Lorenzo was working for her brothers, he came up with the idea to paint this one. When Hunt’s wife died he made this painting a memorial to his wife. He did that by making Isabella’s features like his wife. I think the painting shows us how Isabella was sad because of her loss. You can see next to her hair, there is the flourishing plant of basil. John Keats said that is flourished by her tears but I think it also flourished by her undying love because even after death her love made them grow.