ISABELLA

• "Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel"


  Establishes tragedy, inevitable doom from the very beginning
• "a young palmer in Love's eye"


  Lorenzo as the tragic hero, fatal flaw of romance or procrastination
• "Sleep/ weep"


  End rhymes emphasise tragedy
• "Sick longing"


  Longings, desires, romance
• "Sad plight" / "cheeks paler" / "drink her tears"


  Deathly, tragic, pain despite love
• "My soul is to its doom"


  Tragedy, fatalistic, caesura makes reader pause and absorb tragedy
• "Wintry cold / summer clime"

  Inevitable changing of the seasons, wheel of fortune turning, death vs fertility, growth
• "Two brothers from ancestral merchandise"


  Capitalism, industry, opposed by romantics, clear antagonists
• "Torchèd mines and noisy factories" / "stinging whip"


  Lexical field of death, pain, oppression
• "Why were they proud?"


  Hubris critiqued, antithesis of Lorenzo, repeated to emphasise
• "Lilies that do paler grow"


  Funeral flower, deathly, wilting, tragic
• "Cut mercy with a sharp knife to the bone"


  Gothic, dark, tragic, brothers are the only unambiguous villains
• "Forest dim / bury him"


  Highlights tragedy, gothic element
• "Ah! what if I should lose thee, when so fain I a to stifle all the heavy sorrow"


  Procrastination is Lorenzo's fatal flaw, proleptic to actual loss
• "There was Lorenzo slain and buried in"

  Blunt, unsubtle, ambiguous, unlike romantics,
• "Not tomorrow/ sorrow"


  Highlights tragedy, sorrow, death
• "Weeps alone for pleasures not to be


  Love is lacking, sorrow, regret
• "Instead of love, O misery!"


  Typical, tragic, wallowing, meloncholy
• "Autumn... winter"


  Changing seasons, inevitability, wheel of fortune changing
• "Death among the bushes and the leaves"


  Winter is deathly, setting used to underline the peripetia of Isabella and Lorenzo
• "Sweet Isabel by gradual decay from beauty fell"

  Fall of hero, peripetia
• "I am a shadow now, alas! alas! Alone."


  Underpins her pain, melodramatic, caesura of alone demonstrates isolation
• "But there is a crime - a brother's bloody knife"


  Realisation, rising action
• "Fate with pleasure or with strife"


  Contrast of love/ misery, happiness and death, tragedy
• "Kissed it with a lip more chill than stone... put it in her bosom"


  Gruesome climax, contrast death, rotting with tenderness and nurturing behaviour
• "Cold, dead indeed, but not dethroned"


  Death and love, conflating themes, hero's "high status" remains despite death, admired by Isabel
• "Eye's sepulchral cell pointed each fringèd lash, the smearèd loam"


  Disgusting, gothic, chilling
• "O melancholy, linger here awhile! O music.. o echo"


  Heightens tragedy, melodrama, repeated refrain of love and loss, pleasure in pain
• "And so she pined, and so she died forlorn" / "her love, overcast"


  Sad, inevitable death of Isabella, catastrophe of poem
• “O! cruelty to steal my basil pot away from me”
• “To take no formless monsters head”
• “O famed and eloquent Boccaccio!”
• “Why were they proud?”
• ”Twin roses by the Zephyr blown apart”

  • Twin - equal in love / no patriarchy
  • Roses - Summer passion / winter = death and morality
  • Flower imagery is love (nature motif)
• “Changed merrily… their murdered man”

  • Dramatic irony - foreshadows fate of lovers (temporary love)
  • Is Lorenzo unaware of fate - shows power and cruelty of Brothers (represent wealth and capitalism + patriarchy)
  • Against love + innocence
• “Thou are leading me from the wintery cold/ Lady! Thoust me to the summer clime”


  • Pathetic fallacy shows the two lovers
  • Seasonal imagery = mortality of their love
  • Summer = height of their love ( natural and beautiful)
  • Foreshadows their love will end from the winter bitterness
• “Why in the name of glory were they proud”

  • Rhetorical question shows anger of brothers (biased nature of narrator)
  • Perhaps the brothers are justifiable - But the narrators POV has skewed their characters
• LZ - “Younger palmer - Light steps“

  LZ - “Timid lips grew bold”

  BR - “Hunger pride and gained full cowardice/ As two close hebrews

  • Innocence and kindness = he is gentle and the perfect companion for Isabella
  • Cruel and greedy
  • They wished to protect Isabella but for selfish motives based on bigotry
• “Fair Isabel! Poor simple Isabel”

  • Stereotypes as a pure passionate woman
• “Lisped tenderly/Lorenzo”

  • Pursuing Lorenzo - breaking her passiveness as she initiates her first contact
  • Lisping - Seductive at the time