Isabella Flashcards
Isabella’s innocence, goodness.
Unable to express her love; expected to be subservient and reserved as a female
‘Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!’
‘gentle’
‘sweet Isabella’s untouched cheek’
‘poor girl’
‘lisped tenderly,/ ‘Lorenzo!- here she ceased her timid quest.’
Lorenzo’s low status
‘Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye’
‘the servant of their trade designs’
Isabella and Lorenzo’s love: Love as sickness
Love as debilitating
‘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’
Isabella and Lorenzo’s love: Romeo and Juliet reference
‘From her chamber window he would catch/ Her beauty.’
Isabella and Lorenzo’s love: Natural Imagery
‘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’
Prophetic Interjections from the narrator…
‘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’
The brothers are representative of exploitative capitalist forces
‘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’
Narrators disapproval of the brothers; brothers as villainous
‘Why were they proud?’ X4
‘these men of cruel clay’
‘serpents’
Isabella associated with bird imagery
‘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’
The brothers desire for Isabella to marry a Nobel man
‘Twas their plan to coax her by degrees/ To some high Nobel and his olive-trees’
Conservative ethics of inter-class relations
‘they fixed upon a surest way/ To make the youngster for his crime atone’
The plot of the brothers
‘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!’
Lorenzo’s respectful nature
‘Lorenzo, courteously as he won’t,/ Bow’d a fair greeting to these serpents’ whine’
The ‘goodbye’ of Isabella and Lorenzo
‘When, looking up, he saw her features bright/ Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.’
‘Goodbye!’… ‘And as he went she chanted merrily’
The contrast between the brothers and Lorenzo
‘Sick and wan/ The brother’s faces did seem,/ Lorenzo’s flushed with love’
Isabella’s state after the murder of Lorenzo
Imagery of lifelessness
‘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’
Isabella’s vision of Lorenzo’s ghost
‘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’
Isabella’s excavation of Lorenzo
‘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’
Imagery of labour associated with excavation
‘dismal labouring’/ ‘three hours they labour’d’
Isabella loses her connection with the natural world due to her lost love
‘And she forgot the moon and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees’
Isabella’s relationship with the basil pot
‘in peace/ Hung over her sweet Basil evermore, moisten’d it with tears unto the core’
Isabella’s lifelessness
‘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’
The brother’s reaction to the basil pot
‘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’
Isabella’s reaction to her brother’s stealing the Basil pot
‘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.’
Isabella’s death
‘And so she pined, and so she died forlorn,/ Impolirng for her Basil to the last.’
Final line of the poem
‘O cruelty,/ To steal my Basil-pot away from me’
