Isabella; or The Pot of Basil

Isabella; or The Pot of Basil

1. Characters

   • Isabella
     • "lisped tenderly"
     • "«O cruelty, «To steal my Basil-pot away from me!»"
   • Lorenzo
     • "The ruddy tide stifled his voice"
     • "I am a shadow now"
   • Brothers
     • "Enriched from ancestral merchandise"
     • "Why were they proud?"
     • "these men of cruel clay Cut Mercy with a sharp knife to the bone"

2. Tragic Elements

   • Machiavellian villains
   • Tragic fall: Loss of life, love and beauty
   • Inevitability
     • "Poor simple Isabel!"
     • "Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart"
   • Hamartia
     • Lorenzo's cowardice (perhaps they were doomed from the start)
     • Isabella's love and passion
   • Catharsis
     • Shared purgation of pity and anger with the telling of the tale, like the rest of country
     • Less of a moral tale, arguably not Isabella's fault, therefore empty rather than fulfilling
   • Tragic hero
     • atypical: female, innocent, victim of circumstance and love

3. Imagery

   • "There is richest juice in poison-flowers"
   • "forest-hearse"

4. Form and structure

   • narrative poem
     • dramatized, slow-paced
   • Ottava Rima
     • Italian renaissance poetry
     • Stanzas have 8 lines with 11 syllables each, ab ab ab cc rhyme scheme
     • heroic

5. Themes

   • Beauty
     • " So sweet Isabel By gradual decay from beauty fell"
   • Passion and Love
     • "Alas! When passion is both meek and wild"
     • "Poesied with hers in dewy rhyme"
     • "Thou leadest me to summer clime"
     • "I must taste the blossoms that unfold"
     • "’Twas love; cold, - dead indeed, but not dethroned."
   • Desperation and sorrow
     • "Honeyless days and days did he let pass"
   • dreams
   • eternity
     • "evermore"

6. School of Thought

   • Feminism
     • Isabella considered the brother's ownership
       • "’twas their plan to coax her by degrees To some high noble and his olive-trees."
     • Speaks out first to encourage Lorenzo
       • "In her tone and look he read the rest"
   • Marxism
     • Brother's as a capitalist system under which the working class suffer
       • "Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel."

7. Devices

   • Addressing Bocaccio/audience
     • Appeal to authority
     • Sense of inevitability
     • "O eloquent and famed Boccaccio!"
   • Vivid descriptions such as the vision of Lorenzo
     • Marred
     • "miry", "loamed"
     • "cold doom"
     • Wormy circumstance
   • lingering on Isabella's sorrowful descriptions to evoke pity
   • Use of repetition
     • Why were they proud?
     • And she forgot...
   • exclamations