Isabella- By John Keats

Isabella- By John Keats   

                                       

Isabella was a lady from Messina who falls in love with Lorenzo, the administrator of her brothers’ fortune. They learn about the meetings of the lovers. At first they are silent to avoid scandal, but one day they invited Lorenzo to a festival outside the city and murdered him.

Isabella was told that Lorenzo had had to make a long journey abroad. But months pass and he does not return. Isabella mourns and pines the departure of her lover. One day as she lay exhausted and sleeping, Lorenzo’s ghost suddenly appeared before her. He was pale, blood-drabbled, with garments rent and mouldy.

He told her of her brothers’ deed and asked her to find his body where it lay. Isabella finds the grounds where Lorenzo had been murdered. She brings back his head and buries it in a pot of basil. She tends to this obsessively, arousing the suspicions of her brothers’. One day they steal away the pot and Isabella is left alone to die in pain, mourning the death of her one true love.