More Museums

Today we (CoG, Bride, Mater and I) went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. First, the fascinating exhibit The Secrets of Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000BC, then lunch, then wandering through the Sargent Room (actually, early 20th Century artists, but frankly most of the works were by John Singer Sargent).  The Egyptian exhibit was excellent and thought-provoking, and surprisingly an example of how search and discovery of art can inform anthropology, history and cultural studies as well.

In honor of the movie Bright Star, and John Keats, here's the painting Isabella and the Pot of Basil, by John White Alexander.  It refers to Keats' poem Isabella (which we see published in the movie).  (To read more about the painting, click here.)  In the poem, Isabella plants her lover's head in a pot of basil (he had been murdered by her brothers).

...  L.

With duller steel than the Persèan sword
They cut away no formless monster’s head,
But one, whose gentleness did well accord
With death, as life. The ancient harps have said,
Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:
If Love impersonate was ever dead,
Pale Isabella kiss’d it, and low moan’d.
’Twas love; cold,—dead indeed, but not dethroned.
LI. In anxious secrecy they took it home,
And then the prize was all for Isabel:
She calm’d its wild hair with a golden comb,
And all around each eye’s sepulchral cell
Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
She drench’d away:—and still she comb’d, and kept
Sighing all day—and still she kiss’d, and wept.
LII. Then in a silken scarf,—sweet with the dews
Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby,
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent pipe refreshfully,—
She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose
A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set
Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
LIII. And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core....

(From Isabella or, The Pot of Basil, by John Keats)