The song of Lisabetta's basil pot

The song of Lisabetta's basil pot is a lyric of mourning in which an apparently ordinary household object bears the weight of a concealed death. Its speaker laments a stolen basil pot, recalls planting and tending it, and finally declares that love and grief will kill her. In the tale, the brothers have removed the pot after finding Lorenzo’s head wrapped in cloth beneath its earth; Lisabetta keeps asking for it until she falls ill and dies. The song gives public, repeatable form to a loss that the story’s characters have otherwise kept secret, making the pot’s disappearance both the subject of the lament and the trace of the love it cannot directly disclose.

The Stolen Pot as the Song’s Center

The lyric opens with an accusation and a question: “Alack! ah, who can the ill Christian be, That stole my pot away?” The complaint is directed at an unnamed thief, not at the brothers whose intervention drives the episode. That displacement lets the song dwell on what the singer can declare—the pot is gone—while its repeated question makes the loss sound unresolved. The song’s first stanza identifies the object as “My pot of basil of Salern,” and connects it to the speaker’s own labor: she planted it with her own hand. What has been taken is thus not merely a container or a plant, but something made and tended through personal attachment.

The song immediately enlarges that attachment. The basil has “many a spray,” and in the second stanza the pot becomes “a pot with flowers therein,” so abundant that the speaker says she “Slept in its shade.” The image exceeds the literal scale of a potted plant, presenting the cherished object as a small sheltering world. That imaginative enlargement registers the intensity of grief: the pot has become a place to rest, a garden, and the material focus of the speaker’s memory. Its loss removes not only a possession but the intimate setting built around it.

Theft is made more painful by its proximity. The song repeats that the pot was taken “even from my very door,” turning the threshold into the point where private care meets an intrusion that the speaker could not prevent. The speaker calls herself a “luckless maid” and regrets not having died beforehand; she also says she obtained the pot “passing dear” and failed to keep watch over it. The language of guarding a possession gives grief a practical edge: the loss appears preventable in retrospect, although the lament can do nothing to reverse it. Its recurrence of the stolen pot’s location and the speaker’s regret makes the refrain feel like an attempt to return, again and again, to the moment when the loss might have been stopped.

Care, Season, and Memory

The middle stanzas reconstruct the pot through acts of care. The speaker recalls planting marjoram about it, placing the action in the freshness of May, then watering the plant “thrice” and watching its growth week after week. These details give the lament a calendar and a routine. The lost object is remembered not in a single idealized image but through repeated attention: planting, watering, watching. The contrast between that patient cultivation and the abrupt taking makes the theft feel like the destruction of an ongoing relationship with the plant as well as the removal of a beloved possession.

The song’s shifting description—from basil, to flowers, to marjoram around the plant—builds a densely tended garden within the pot’s small bounds. Its language expands the object without losing the speaker’s precise recollection of handling it. The speaker had watched it grow and claims to have watered it regularly; now she can only repeat that it is gone. In this movement, domestic tasks become the song’s evidence of attachment. What might seem minor to an outsider—one pot at a doorway—has accumulated meaning through the hours and seasons the speaker spent caring for it.

The scent makes that memory perceptible to others as well. At sunrise, when the speaker went to water the pot, people would marvel and ask, “Whence comes the sweetest scent?” The question contrasts with the song’s opening: there, the speaker asks who stole the pot; here, observers ask where its fragrance comes from. The once-living plant made private care publicly noticeable, but the onlookers could recognize only the scent, not the love attached to it. After the pot is taken, its remembered fragrance becomes part of the speaker’s pain: the song says that its savour had driven sorrow away. The sensory memory cannot restore the object; instead, it makes absence vivid by recalling what can no longer be smelled or tended.

From Lament to Death

As the lyric proceeds, its complaint grows into a statement of mortal suffering. The speaker first regrets failing to guard the pot, then asks God to ease the wrong done to her, and finally says that she will die for love of it. The object’s value is expressed through the devastation caused by its removal: its loss casts her into “pangs of hell,” and its former fragrance had kept “all dole” away. The song does not explain the secret history inside the pot. In the tale, the brothers discover Lorenzo’s head beneath the earth, recognize him by his curled hair, bury the head, and secretly leave Messina for Naples. The song’s focus on the missing pot can therefore be heard against the story’s knowledge of what it contained, while its own speaker continues to mourn through the language of flowers, fragrance, and theft.

The final stanza makes the song’s claim of impending death explicit: “And I for love of it shall surely die.” It names “love and grief and pain” together, placing affection and suffering in one unbroken sequence. Then it imagines a possible exchange. If someone could say where the pot was, the speaker would willingly buy it back, offering all the “Fivescore gold crowns” in her purse and, if the man wished, a kiss as well. The offer does not resolve the loss; it shows how far she would go to recover the object and how little even a substantial payment can guarantee. The final kiss turns the proposed bargain into an intimate one, linking the pot’s recovery to the speaker’s capacity for love even as the song has already declared her likely death.

Transmission and Narrative Significance

The song’s form depends on return. Across its stanzas, phrases about the stolen pot recur, while each repetition adds a new aspect of its value: its planting, growth, shelter, guarding, scent, and the speaker’s willingness to pay for its return. The refrain-like movement does not bring the singer closer to recovering the object. Instead, it converts the persistence of grief into structure. The song can keep returning to the pot because the story offers no reunion or restoration for Lisabetta; the repeated lament is what remains after the brothers’ discovery and departure have made the private loss irreversible.

The narrative says that, after the matter became known to many, someone composed a song about it, and that the song was still sung. A footnote presents the full lyric as a translation of the song, printed from a manuscript in the Medicean Library in Fanfani’s edition. Its circulation carries Lisabetta’s sorrow beyond her household and beyond her life, while the song itself preserves the concealment at the heart of the episode: it names the stolen basil pot, not Lorenzo’s head. That difference gives the lyric its double force. To a listener it is a lament for a cherished plant; in the context of the tale, every complaint about the pot also recalls the lost lover hidden within it and the grief that outlasts its removal.