Isabella: or The Pot of Basil: Isabella

Question 1

‘Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!’

Answer 1

• ## Repetition.

Question 2

‘Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,’

Question 3

‘Sweet Isabella’s untouched cheek
Fell sick within the rose’s just domain.’

Answer 3

• Sickness imagery. Love is compared with illness. Cataphoric reference to the tragic ending of Isabella and Lorenzo’s romance.
• ‘Rose’ –> Flower of love. Associations of romance. –> Natural imagery. Their love is emphasised by the natural imagery.
• Keat’s was a romantic poet. Romanticism can be defined as a rejection of the doctrine of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Question 4

‘Fell thin as a young mother’s, who doth seek
By every lull her infant’s pain:’

Answer 4

• Motherly imagery. Infantilisation of Lorenzo. –>

Question 5

‘A dreary night of love and misery,
If Isabel’s quick eye had not been wed.’

Answer 5

• Marriage imagery.
• ‘Love and misery’ opposing ideas, Juxtaposition, one cannot exist without the other. Love and misery are interwoven with one another.
• They are in love but separated by class.
• Keats was in the working class whereas the love of his life, Fanny Brawne, belonged to a higher class. Star-crossed lovers who were thrawted by Keat’s deat, kept apart by social divide.

Question 6

‘She saw it waxing very pale and dead.’

Answer 6

• Foreboding language. Death imagery. Cataphoric reference to later events of the poem, i.e Isabella digging up Lorenzo’s corpse.

Question 7

‘He saw her features bright
Smile through an in-door lattice, all delight.’

Answer 7

• Dramatic Irony, Isabella’s brothers will murder Lorenzo.
• Pinacle of Lorenzo and Isabella’s love. –> Heightens the tragedy. This is the last time they see each other and the last time Isabella sees Lorenzo alive.
• Pathos, catharsis,

Question 8

‘Poor girl! put on thy stifiling widow’s weed,’

Answer 8

• Negative natural imagery. Weeds –> Dead flowers, symbolise corruption and decay.
• Repetition of ‘Poor’ from the beginning of the poem. –> Fate? Was this always destined to happen? Even from the beginning?
• Suffering, Misery, Pathos, Catharsis.

Question 9

‘She weeps alone for pleasures not to be;
Sorely she wept until the night came on, And then, instead of love, O misery!’

Answer 9

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Question 10

‘And to the silence made a gentle moan.’

Answer 10

• No longer moaning out of pleasure but instead misery.

Question 11

‘She fretted for the golden hour,’

Answer 11

• Desperate, restless descriptions. Disorder in Isabella’s life since Lorenzo’s “disappearance,” –> order has been disrupted.

Question 12

‘with an eye all pale,’

Answer 12

• Blindness. Isabella

Question 13

‘How she might find the clay, so dearly prized,
And sing to it one latest lullaby;’

Answer 13

• More motherly imagery.

Question 14

‘She kissed it with a lip more chill than stone,
And put it in her bosom.’

Answer 14

• Motherly imagery.

Question 15

‘Her veiling hair,’

Answer 15

• Marriage imagery

Question 16

‘Pale Isabella kissed it, and low moaned.
‘Twas love - cold, dead indeed, but not dethroned.’

Answer 16

• Death of love.

Question 17

‘the prize was all for Isabel.
She calmed its wild hair with a golden comb,’

Question 18

‘With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,’

Question 19

‘still she kissed, and wept.’

Question 20

‘And she forgot the stars, the moon, and the sun,’

Answer 20

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Question 21

‘And so she ever fed it with thin tears,
Whence thick, and green, and beautiful it grew,
So that it smelt more balmy than its peers,’

Question 22

‘From her dead eyes;’

Question 23

‘For seldom did she go to chapel-shrift,
And seldom felt she any hunger-pain;
And when she left, she hurried back, as swift.’

Question 24

‘As bird on wing to breast its eggs again;
And, patient, as a hen-bire, sat her there
Beside her basil, weeping through her hair.’

Question 25

‘For Isabel, sweet Isabel, will die -
Will die a death too lone and incomplete.’

Question 26

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

Question 27

’ ‘O cruelty,
To steal my basil-pot away from me!’ ‘