In class, Janelle asked for possible answers to the question “wherefore all this wormy circumstance?” I may be taking this too metaphorically, but I think that the “wormy circumstance” is the corruption of pure love. We are presented with a Romeo and Juliet –like love story, which is one of the most famous examples of true love in western literature. Isabel and Lorenzo are star-crossed lovers who exist simply for each other. Their love is pure and true, seemingly incorruptible.
Then we are presented with Isabelle’s two brothers. Unlike Lorenzo, they are cowardly, proud, and cruel. They also care deeply for the sister, but their love is impure. They claim that their desire is to give Isabel to a rich nobleman, but I believe that they are actually harboring incestuous love for sister. Keats writes that Isabelle’s brothers were “well nigh mad” that Lorenzo “should be in their sister’s love be blithe and glad”. They are “sick and wan” that Lorenzo is “flush with love”. After they lie to Isabel, each night, they “groan’d aloud” thinking of their sister. They want to keep Isabel for themselves and Lorenzo stands in their way.
Isabel’s brothers poison their sister’s love by murdering Lorenzo. They take what is most important to Isabelle and destroy it, all for their own impure desires. They drive their own sister mad. Isabel’s plan of burying her lover’s head and growing basil out of it seems horrifying to the reader, but to her it was the only way to be near the man she will always love. It sounds insane because Isabel is insane. When Lorenzo was alive, she lived for him and at the end of the story she lives for her pot of basil, until that too is taken away from her by her brothers’ incestuous jealousy.
After reading the poem, I’m thinking the wormy circumstance speaks to something similar to this corruption of pure love you mention. I’d say it begins to create a “circle of life” idea that is expanded as Isabella cries over her basil. The following two lines (386-387) start to tie the death of pure love with the end of innocence: “Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? O for the gentleness of old Romance.” Isabella hesitates on the tomb because by trying to keep her old love alive, she knows their love will not be the same as their ideal “old Romance.” Yet there is something touching and beautiful in this act, as Keats asks the reader to “taste the music of that vision pale” (393) at the end of the stanza. The entanglement of the senses, taste, hearing, and vision, here to me suggests a unity in life and death – a “wormy circumstance.” As macabre as it seems, maybe Keats suggests there is something beautiful in Isabella’s attempt to forge a circle of life and by planting Lorenzo and nourishing the plant with her tears.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I do not really know how to approach the question at hand. I agree with Chris that the phrase eludes to the circle of life in that we are not so distant from worms as we may believe. What I really want to comment on is your theory that the brothers have incestial love for Isabella. If Keats is trying to make the connection between love and death then I think he has to avoid describing love as entirely good. In order for love to be so close to death, it has to be natural, it must exist as a cycle. Love has to be birthed, then mature, then die. For Keats, Love is the true embodiment of the fallacy of the ephemeral.
ReplyDeleteAmong other things, I think this poem serves to re-define the chain of being in a literary sense. It is easy to see the chain of being and natural imagery throughout the poem, especially in the case of Lorenzo dying, Isabella potting his soil, and something new growing from that soil. Very simply this imagery shows the nature of mankind and how man's life and death helps for new beings and ideas to grow. I also think that they chain of being is represented in this poem in a deeper sense. Maybe this chain represents the unstoppable, unchangeable cycle of love. Like Amelia points out, love is the key cause of distraction, death, and despair in this poem. Seemingly by taking on life, one is allowing their partner to become vulnerable. Therefore, each relationship requires selflessness but also ignorance and selfishness. The chain of being and cycle of life perpetually work their magic in love as a reminder that all aspects of life are fragile and limited.
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