Isabella

• Jack stillinger - beauty

  “Keats finds melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain”
• How are the brothers introduced?

  “Hungry shark[s]” with “ancestral merchandise”

  Brothers symbolise predators and capitalism

  Inherited wealth the brothers dont deserve
• Industial revolution reference

  “Torched mines and noisy factories”
• presentation of Isabella’s vision about lorenzo’s wherabouts

  “it came like a fierce potion”

  simile, supernatural
• Lorenzo in the vision

  “Alone. i chant the holy mass”

  caesura makes for a fragmented read, uncomfortable like Lorenzo, aligning himself with divinity compared to brothers
• Isabella’s tragic downfall

  “.So sweet Isabel/by gradual decay from beauty fell”
• Isabella’s reaction to lorenzo’s death

  “instead of love, O misery” - juxtaposing ideas

  “She wept until the night came on” the night previously connoted their “amourous dark” love and sexual activities, but is now fill with misery.
• Lorenzo and Isabella’s love

  “great happiness/grew, like a lusty flower in June’s caress” - erotic simile, flower reproductive organ of plant - sexual relationship has begun, june personified
• fated tragedy of their love

  “twin roses by the zephyr blown apart”

  zephyr is the wind and the name of cupids attendant
• description of the basil

  “it smelt more balmy than its peers” - suggests Lorenzo’s higher moral quality than the brothers
• parallelism of Isabella’s love and death

  “And so she pined and so she died forlorn”
• introduction to lovers

  “Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel” - juxtaposing epithets

  “Sick longing”

  “Made their cheeks paler with the break of June”
• Isabella’s anagnorisis

  “thou hast schooled my infancy”
• Forshadowing her death

  “Kissed it with a lip more chill than stone”

  “thin tears“
• Sense of waste

  “Youth and beauty thrown aside”
• Isabella’s motherly tendancies over the basil

  “As a bird on wing to breast its eggs again”

  “Sweet basil which her tears kept ever wet“
• Isabella‘s unhealthy attachment to basil

  “Asking for her lost basil amorously”
• Catharsis

  “O cruelty to steal my basil pot away from me”

  (last line of poem that is the same as the previous stanza - reinforcing the tragedy)

  “No heart was there in Florence but did mourn in pity of her love”
• What could Lorenzo being like a ghost mean?

  Along with the exhumation of his head it show the poems longing to escape from reality
• Sandy

  Readers are forced to share not simply in the initial delight of the lovers, but in the responsibility of the discovery of their secret by Isabella's brothers
• Treatment of women

  The women in Keats' poems seem only to exist for the sake of love and as fragile figures to be protected (or ravished) by males. For example, in Isabella: or The Pot of Basil, Isabella is depicted as residing in a 'downy nest' and is described as 'poor, simple Isabella' (unlike her equally besotted lover “whose gentleness did well accord”). Whereas Isabella 'By gradual decay from beauty fell,' once robbed of Lorenzo.
• Metaphor for the danger of love

  “Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers”

  the danger of their love makes it more enthralling and heightens their downfall
• Hubris

  Lorenzo: believes he can enter a marriage above his social status

  Isabella: believes she can defy social norms and patriarchal control of her brothers over her marriage
• Peripeteia

  Isabella‘s capitalist brothers kill lorenzo
• What moral lesson is learnt

  Not to disrupt the order of society, nativity
• Religious Imagery

  The poem contains examples of religious imagery, as in l.2 with a reference to 'Palmer' or pilgrim. Just as the pilgrim seeks a shrine where he may worship God, so Lorenzo needs a woman to worship, through whom he may worship Love. In l.64 Keats uses the word 'shrive', i.e. confess. Just as the pilgrim cannot be at peace until he has confessed his sins and has received absolution, so Lorenzo feels the necessity of confessing his love.
• Keat’s view of the poem

  worried that there was 'too much inexperience of life and simplicity of knowledge in it'.
• How does Keats veer from Bocaccio’s Decameron

  By making the character of Isabella a gentle 'simple' innocent, who is overwhelmed by tender passions rather than the matter-of-fact depiction of women by Boccaccio

  By making Isabella and Lorenzo suffer before consummating their relationship (which adds to the tragedy). Isabella and Lorenzo are not caught flagrant (i.e. in the act of sexual intercourse) as they are in Boccaccio's text.
• structure

  Ottava rima

  • iambic pentameter
  • alternatively rhymed first 6 lines
  • that build up to ‘punch line’ effect in concluding rhyming couplet
  • this form suggests resolution whereas Keats repeatedly leaves stanza’s open, promising but withholding info
• narrators tone

  sometimes comically inappropriate ‘Ah wherefore all this wormy circumstance’ after the corpse is disinterred.
• Romantic irony

  the narrator frequently draws our attention to the fact he is telling story, asking for ‘forgiving boon’ from Boccaccio
• Brothers pride

  “why were they proud?…why in the name of glory were they proud” - keats criticising capitalist society for its greed and materialism that underlies idealistic romance
• Contrasts

  Young love/sexual passion vs heartless capitalism

  Imagination/ idyllic world vs reality
• Isabella‘s exhumation of her lovers body meaning

  lament for the loss of love, pleasure and beauty which results from the pressures of social and economic demands - a longing to escape reality
• alternative view to the good/bad contrasts

  the supposedly opposing terms become intermingled, notions of beauty intricately involved in scenes of horror - “her veiling hair“, she wraps up the head in a “silken scarf”

  The idealistic world of the lovers can be seen as just as limiting as the brothers cold, rational world because they exclude the wider human society. Their naïveté and unawareness of the outside world makes them vulnerable and unable to defend themselves against manipulative worldly brothers

  • so the poem could be questioning the feasibility of their idealism
• psycho-analytical reading

  what the poem suggests about the construction of identity - isabella can find no identity through love and is only defined as female as the passion between the lovers is transformed to a macabre mother-child relationship in Lorenzos death
• Marxist-feminist reading

  identities of Lorenzo and Isabella are defined through love but they accept and subordinate their emotions to social codes of sexual behaviour. Lorenzo plays courtly lover and Isabella the object of his love. Marxists would point out that these roles have been established to serve economic interests society
• the brothers plan for Isabella

  “Tas their plan to coax her by degrees to some high noble and his olive trees“