Isabella Summary and Analysis

Question 1

When was ‘Isabella’ written?

Answer 1

1818

Question 2

Where is ‘Isabella’ set?

Answer 2

Florence

Question 3

What are the name’s of the tragic victims in ‘Isabella’?

Answer 3

Isabella and Lorenzo

Question 4

What does the opening line do for the poem?

Answer 4

• uses two juxtaposing epithets (‘Fair Isabel’, ‘poor, simple Isabel!’)
• immediately sets the tone of the story
• immediately identifies that there will be two conflicting causes throughout the poem

Question 5

What is the source of the conflict between Isabella and Lorenzo?

Answer 5

• Lorenzo is of working class
• Isabella and her family are successful and well-off

Question 6

What happens in the first thirteen stanzas of the poem?

Answer 6

• Isabella and Lorenzo’s love is celebrated
• the lovers are depicted as close and connected in spite of their differences in class
• important in the fate of the rest of the poem
• Keats represents an overriding theme of growing – this foreshadows the use of the Basil plant later in the story

Question 7

What is the contextual link to other tragedy works of Isabella and Lorenzo’s love?

Answer 7

• the image of a romance between two very different people in terms of social status may have been mirrored from Shakespearean tragedy, such as Othello

Question 8

What happens to the tone of the poem once Isabella’s brothers are introduced after the thirteenth stanza?

Answer 8

• Keats employs a dramatic tone change

Question 9

What happens in stanza sixteen of the poem?

Answer 9

• acts as a pivotal, hubristic stanza which develops all of the stream of consciousness that the reader feels towards the brothers
• the stanza is used to display Keats’ own hatred of the brothers

Question 10

What do the brothers do to Lorenzo?

Answer 10

They take him to a forest and murder him

Question 11

When does Lorenzo reappear in the poem?

Answer 11

• after his death Lorenzo appears to Isabella in her dream

Question 12

What does Lorenzo’s ghost say to Isabella?

Answer 12

• he tells her what her brother’s did to him
• Lorenzo guides Isabella to the place where her brother’s buried him

Question 13

What happens when Isabella reaches Lorenzo’s grave?

Answer 13

• she digs up his body and takes his skull

Question 14

What does Isabella do to Lorenzo’s head?

Answer 14

• reburies it in a Basil pot, with the plant growing on top of it

Question 15

How does the theme of growing arise again?

Answer 15

• Isabella’s tears keep the soil of the plant wet so that it grows and flourishes

Question 16

What happens in the end of the poem?

Answer 16

• the brother’s steal Isabella’s Basil pot and then flee their crimes
• Isabella dies completely alone, in grief and sadness
• highly cathartic