Queen Isabella Of Boston Poem by Linda Hepner

Fleetingly, flamboyant Isabella
Flings the doors open and then steps outside,
Naked arms apart and white robed, stellar,
Bejeweled, decolletée; no young Boston bride
Must imitate her! Buttoned-jacket mothers
Turning to their pastors purse their lips:
Such New York flaunt may be approved by others
But it’s a scandal to expand your hips
And give impressions that your waist in slim
While mixing freely with such hoi-polloi
As Henry James and artists queer like him.
She deems her home some large expensive toy,
Squandering her father’s well-earned money,
Flying in her husband’s ashen face,
And when he dies those bees about the honey
Will taste her: shun the sure disgrace!

But lovely Isabella laughs, embraces
In her arms the Arts we long to hold
And builds her palace, welcoming straight-laces,
Artists, artisans, and all behold.
Outside the palace, raise your wistful glances,
Perhaps the queen is waving you goodbye…
And there immured she pirouetting dances,
Her arms raised in her royal guise, a Y.


Linda Hepner
11.26.08
After visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston where Anders Zorn’s 1894 painting captures her with arms raised in enthusiasm on her balcony in Venice.
A tall slender Y as in Ysabella of Spain is built into the outside wall above the entry.


Isabella Stewart Gardner first welcomed visitors to her museum on New Year's Day,1903. On that evening guests listened to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, gazed in wonder at the courtyard full of flowers, and viewed one of the nation's finest collections of art. Today, visitors experience much the same thing. The Gardner Museum has remained essentially unchanged since its founder's death in 1924. Unchanged but certainly not stagnant. Three floors of galleries surround a garden courtyard blooming with life in all seasons.

Anders Zorn's Mrs. Gardner in Venice 1894 -The sense of vitality and artistic flair that Isabella Stewart Gardner found in Venice - and by which she lived her life in Boston - is eloquently captured by Zorn. Painted in the Palazzo Barbaro, the portrait captures the moment when, watching fireworks from a balcony, she stood in the doorway, arms outstretched, and invited her guests to join her to watch the display.