Isabella

Question 1

Isabella quotes

Answer 1

‘Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!’
- ‘poor’ foreshadows her heartbreak
‘vespers’ - religious
‘Isabella’s untouched cheek’ - virginal innocence, fragile, chaste
‘Fell sick’ ‘fell thin’ - withering away
overwhelming emotion - weak, vulnerable (contrasts Gatsby’s ambition)
‘She weeps alone’ - plagued by suffering
‘breath of winter comes from far away’ - death
‘gradual decay’
‘I thought the worst was simple misery’
‘fed with thin tears’ - through grieving for Lorenzo she is keeping his memory alive
‘she withers like a palm’ - ‘palmer’
‘simple Isabel is soon to be among the dead.’ - caesura - finality of Isabella’s life
‘she died forlorn’ - alone, heartbreak, suffering

Question 2

‘a young palmer’ to describe Lorenzo (anaylsis)

Answer 2

‘a young palmer’
- a metaphor recalling the line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ‘palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss’. Palmers were pilgrims who brought back palm leaves in the shape of a cross from the Holy Land. Later on in the poem, Isabella herself also ‘withers like a palm’ Keats uses the same figurative imagery for both lovers to signify their perfect union and twinned souls

Question 3

General quotes of Isabella and Lorenzo’s state of love

Answer 3

‘malady’ - illness
‘nightly weep’ - their unresolved feelings for each other
‘love grew tenderer’
‘made their cheeks paler’ - illness
‘a whole long month of May’ - wasted time
‘June’ ‘To-morrow’ - too hesitant to confess, taking time for granted (wasted time)
‘when passion is both meek and wild’ - oxymoron, unruly feelings and the inability to express them
‘dusk’ + ‘veil’ - hiding their love, secretive, furtive
‘too much of tears’ ‘too much of pity’ - Keats associates love with sadness
‘Theseus’ spouse’ - Ariadne abandoned by Theseus (just like Isabella)
‘there is richest juice in poison-flowers’
‘hungry death hath marred’ - personification of death- reminder of how grief has permeated every part of Keats’ life
‘Persèan sword’ - reference to Greek mythology (beheading of Madusa)

Question 4

Lorenzo quotes

Answer 4

‘falcon spies’ - predatory bird- menacing? loves her beauty
‘I will drink her tears’ - reference to the head and basil pot (foreshadows his death - future is preordained and inevitable due to class divisions
‘his high conceit of such a bride’ - Keats and Fanny Brawne’s romance was thwarted due to the disparate social classes they belonged to
‘meekness of a child’ - like Gatsby
‘I can half perceive’ - his naivety, cannot see fully (the dangers)
‘how near my soul is to its doom’
‘leading me from wintry cold’ to ‘summer clime’
‘hunted hare’
‘their murdered man’ - strips him of his identity (dehumanises him)

Question 5

The brothers, corruption and capitalism quotes

Answer 5

‘ancestral merchandise’ - handed down wealth from families (Buchanans too)
‘torchèd mines and noisy factories’
- capitalism, industrial revolution, setting change
‘in blood’
‘stinging whip’
‘pinch and peel’ - harsh, cruel
‘why were they proud?’ anaphora- hubris of the brothers
‘these money-bags’ - obsession with money, embody capitalism
‘coax her’ to ‘some high noble and his olive trees’ - symbolic of money + land ownership
‘make the youngster for his crime atone’ - defy social boundaries
‘dim’ + ‘him’ - rhyming couplet emphasises the lack of emotion they feel + the speed or haste of the murder
‘serpents’ - sly, duplicitous, cunning, devious
‘sick and wan’ - their faces
‘slaughter’
‘dipped their swords in the water’ - lack of remorse, absolve themselves of guilt link to Macbeth (‘a little water clears us of this deed’)
‘richer by his being a murderer’ - after the ‘slaughter’
‘contrived to steal the basil-pot’ - cunning, devious brothers
‘they went … to banishment’

Question 6

Context

Answer 6

Written in 1818: Keats and Fanny Brawne began courtship in 1818 and were engaged in October 1819, but Fanny’s mother refused to sanction the marriage until Keats has achieved financial stability
He cared for his brother Tom since 1817 who was sick with tuberculosis and died of it in late 1818- it is believed that Keats’ care of his brother was the reason that he himself contracted the disease
He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1820 and died in February 1821

Question 7

Summary of events

Answer 7

The tragic love story of Isabella and Lorenzo.

• Isabella is a wealthy woman, and Lorenzo is a lower-class worker employed by her brothers.
• The two fall in love, but their romance is kept secret due to their social differences.
• Isabella’s brothers discover the relationship and are enraged by it.
• Concerned about wealth and family reputation, the brothers murder Lorenzo and bury his body in the forest.
• Isabella, unaware of Lorenzo’s fate, believes he has abandoned her.
• Lorenzo’s ghost appears to Isabella in a dream, revealing where his body is buried.
• Isabella retrieves Lorenzo’s head from his grave and places it in a pot of basil.
• She obsessively tends to the pot, watering it with her tears.
• Her strange behavior raises suspicion, and her brothers eventually discover the pot and Lorenzo’s remains.
• The brothers steal the basil pot and flee, leaving Isabella heartbroken.
• Isabella succumbs to her grief, suggesting her eventual death.

The poem explores themes of love, loss, greed, social class, and obsession.