Isabella

Question 1

Isabella’s innocence, goodness.

Unable to express her love; expected to be subservient and reserved as a female

Answer 1

‘Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!’
‘gentle’
‘sweet Isabella’s untouched cheek’
‘poor girl’

‘lisped tenderly,/ ‘Lorenzo!- here she ceased her timid quest.’

Question 2

Lorenzo’s low status

Answer 2

‘Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye’

‘the servant of their trade designs’

Question 3

Isabella and Lorenzo’s love: Love as sickness

Love as debilitating

Answer 3

‘They could not in the self-same mansion dwell/ Without some stir of heart, some malady’

Lorenzo: ‘but I cannot live/ Another night, and not my passion shrive’

Question 4

Isabella and Lorenzo’s love: Romeo and Juliet reference

Answer 4

‘From her chamber window he would catch/ Her beauty.’

Question 5

Isabella and Lorenzo’s love: Natural Imagery

Answer 5

‘A whole long month in this sad plight/ Made their cheeks paler by the break of June’
‘Lady! thou leadest me to summer clime’
‘great happiness/ Grew, like a lusty flower in Une’s caress’
She ‘sang of delicious love and honey’d dart’
‘Close in a bower of hyacinth and musk’
‘lilies that do paler grow’

Question 6

Prophetic Interjections from the narrator…

Answer 6

‘Ah! Better had it been for ever so/ Than idle ears should pleasure in their woe’
‘Too many tears for lovers have been shed’
‘Though Dido silent is in the under grove/ And Isabella’s was a great distress’
‘Even bees, the little almsmen of spring flowers,/ Know there is the richest juice in poison-flowers’

Question 7

The brothers are representative of exploitative capitalist forces

Answer 7

‘Enriched by ancestral merchandise’
‘Money bags’
‘and for them many a weary hand did swelt’…‘for them’…‘for them’
‘Half ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel’

‘Each richer for his being a murderer’

Question 8

Narrators disapproval of the brothers; brothers as villainous

Answer 8

‘Why were they proud?’ X4
‘these men of cruel clay’
‘serpents’

Question 9

Isabella associated with bird imagery

Answer 9

‘Fair Isabella in her downy nest’

‘And when she left, she hurried back, as swift/ As a bird on wing to breast it’s eggs again’

‘Patient as a hen-bird sat her there/ Beside her Basil, weeping through her hair’

Question 10

The brothers desire for Isabella to marry a Nobel man

Answer 10

‘Twas their plan to coax her by degrees/ To some high Nobel and his olive-trees’

Question 11

Conservative ethics of inter-class relations

Answer 11

‘they fixed upon a surest way/ To make the youngster for his crime atone’

Question 12

The plot of the brothers

Answer 12

‘these men of cruel clay/ Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone, for they resolved in some forest dim/ To kill Lorenzo, and there bury him.’

‘their murdered man’

‘Into a forest quiet for the slaughter/ There was Lorenzo slain and buried in’

‘There is crime- a brother’s bloody knife!’

Question 13

Lorenzo’s respectful nature

Answer 13

‘Lorenzo, courteously as he won’t,/ Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine’

Question 14

The ‘goodbye’ of Isabella and Lorenzo

Answer 14

‘When, looking up, he saw her features bright/ Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.’
‘Goodbye!’… ‘And as he went she chanted merrily’

Question 15

The contrast between the brothers and Lorenzo

Answer 15

‘Sick and wan/ The brother’s faces did seem,/ Lorenzo’s flushed with love’

Question 16

Isabella’s state after the murder of Lorenzo

Imagery of lifelessness

Answer 16

‘She weeps alone for pleasures not to be’
‘So sweet Isabel/ By gradual decay from beauty fell’
‘in her snowy shrowd’
‘gnawing fire at heart and brain’

Question 17

Isabella’s vision of Lorenzo’s ghost

Answer 17

‘It was a vision’…‘Lorenzo stood and wept: the forest tomb had marr’d his glossy hair’
‘cold doom/ Upon his lips…‘the pale shadow spake’
‘Isabella on its music hung’
‘It’s eyes, though wild, were still all dewy bright/ With love’
‘Go, shed one tear upon my heather-bloom,/ ‘And it shall comfort me within the tomb’

Question 18

Isabella’s excavation of Lorenzo

Answer 18

‘How she might find the clay, so dearly prized/ And sing to it one latest lullaby’
‘Upon the murderous plot she seem’d to grow,/ Like a Native lily of the dell’
‘Then with her knife, all sudden, she began/ To dig more fervently than misers can.’
‘She kissed [a glove] with a lip more chill than stone/ And put it her bosom, where it dries’
‘With duller steel than the Persian sword/ They cut away no formless monster’s head’

Question 19

Imagery of labour associated with excavation

Answer 19

‘dismal labouring’/ ‘three hours they labour’d’

Question 20

Isabella loses her connection with the natural world due to her lost love

Answer 20

‘And she forgot the moon and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees’

Question 21

Isabella’s relationship with the basil pot

Answer 21

‘in peace/ Hung over her sweet Basil evermore, moisten’d it with tears unto the core’

Question 22

Isabella’s lifelessness

Answer 22

‘she withers, like a palm/ Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm’
‘youth and beauty should be thrown aside/ By one marked out to be a Nobel’s bride’

Question 23

The brother’s reaction to the basil pot

Answer 23

‘her brethren wonder’d much/ Why she sat dropping by the Basil green,/ And why it flourished’

‘Yet they contriv’d to steal the Basil-pot…‘And yet they knew it was Lorenzo’s face’

‘The guerdon of their murder they had got,/ And so left Florence in a moment’s space/ Never to turn again’

Question 24

Isabella’s reaction to her brother’s stealing the Basil pot

Answer 24

‘For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die;/ Will die a death too lone and incomplete,/ Now they have ta’en away her Basil sweet’

‘Piteous she look’d on dead and senseless things,/ Asking for her lost Basil amorously’

‘For cruel ‘tis,’/ said she, /’To steal my Basil-pot away from me.’

Question 25

Isabella’s death

Answer 25

‘And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,/ Impolirng for her Basil to the last.’

Question 26

Final line of the poem

Answer 26

‘O cruelty,/ To steal my Basil-pot away from me’