Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Isabella; or The Pot of Basil
- 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"
- 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
- Imagery
- "There is richest juice in poison-flowers"
- "forest-hearse"
- 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
- 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"
- 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."
- 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