The Aesthetics of Violence

John Keat's poem "Isabella," to point out the obvious, is violent. This is a poem where a woman sneaks away into a dark forest, exhumes her lover's corpse, and decapitates it with a dull knife. Yet despite the macabre violence, the poem is still exceptionally beautiful. 

Keat chooses to write his poem in sixty three iambic octets with a rhyme scheme of abababcc. This is a poetic structure known as Ottava Rima. The structure is Italian in origin and was also used by Boccaccio, the same Italian medieval poet that wrote the original Basil Pot story that inspired Keat's poem. Ottava Rima was traditionally used to write longer narrative poems that dealt with heroic themes. It's use in "Isabella" elevates the poem to the status of a classical epic or an old fashioned romance. It also puts the reader into the world of the poem, a world not of gritty realism but a world of myth and legend.

Let us look more closely at stanza L (pg. 201), the stanza where Isabella actually decapitates Lorenzo's corpse. The first couple of lines in the stanza is "With duller steel than the Perséan sword/ They cut away no formless monster's head." Keats doesn't let the decapitation happen offstage, he presents it to us head on. Isabella cuts away at Lorenzo (with a dull knife) like Perseus cuts away at Medusa. The decapitation is happening right in front of the reader, and yet the act is not quite grotesque. By referencing the myth of Perseus and Medusa Keats makes Lorenzo's decapitation worthy of as much praise and admiration as Medusa's decapitation--this is an act that deserves the reader's reverence and awe.

Yet Keats goes on to say in stanza L that Lorenzo's decapitation is very different from Medusa's since Isabella cuts away at "no formless monster's head,/But one, whose gentleness did well accord/With death, as life." Isabella isn't a Greek warrior fighting off an ancient monster. Isabella is a mourning lover committing her ultimate deed of tender love for Lorenzo. "The ancient harps have said,/Love never dies, but lives, immortal Lord:" Isabella's love for Lorenzo is the kind of love that "ancient harps" sing about. It is a love that is legendary. The stanza ends with the line, "'Twas love; cold,--dead indeed, but not dethroned." Isabella's lover lies cold and dead, and yet it is still somehow a triumph for "love." The murderous avarice of Isabella's brothers was not enough to kill their love. Love found a way to continue, even if it had to get its hands dirty.

This is something that is only possible in the realm of myth and legend. In real life Isabella's actions would not be a triumph of love, it would be literally insane. The world that Keats paints for us in "Isabella" is not the world of reality. It is a world more fantastic and surreal. A world where the mutilation of a corpse is a scene of pure devoted love, and not a scene of abject horror. 

Why does Keats aestheticize the violence? What statement might he be trying to make?

How else does Keats aestheticize the violence in his poem? How does he use allusion, description, and direct addresses to the reader to achieve this?

Why does Keats interrupt the action in stanza XLIX? What is he trying to say to the reader and why? How does this help aestheticize the violence in the following stanza where Isabella decapitates Lorenzo?

Medusa's decapitated head still had the power to turn people into stone. What power does Lorenzo's decapitated have over the living?