Isabella, or the Pot of Basil

Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818) is a narrative poem by John Keats adapted from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron (IV, 5).

It tells the tale of a young woman whose family intend to marry her to "some high noble and his olive trees", but who falls for Lorenzo, one of her brothers' employees.

She exhumes the body and buries the head in a pot of basil which she tends obsessively, while pining away.

Both are set in the Middle Ages and concern passionate and dangerous romances.

Later, John White Alexander depicted the poem in his 1897 Isabella and the Pot of Basil, currently held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.