isabella or the pot of basil quotes

“With every morning their love grew tenderer”

• use of comparative adjectives which suggest their love is growing

“The breath of winter comes”

• seasons symbolise change

• Tragic atmosphere

“Cold is in the skies”

Foreshadowing

“Fed it with thin tears whence thick and green… it grew”

• contrast between her tears being “thin” and the basil growing to be “thick” could serve to perhaps portray the physical weakness and exhaustion she may be experiencing whilst also inferring that she is relinquishing all her physical strength to the growth of the basil

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

• the end of the previous stanza is repeated reinforcing and encapsulating the tragedy

• Interesting Isabella speaks the final lines of the poem since she has been robbed of her own voice throughout by her brothers who forced their views of life onto her

• Now they have left she is able to reclaim her agency and speak for herself

“She withers like a palm cut by an Indian”

• Isabella is deteriorating, her life is focused on the basil pot; there is no purpose to her being in the world

• Keats in his poetry makes frequent references to exploration and the world that was opening up

“Distant in humanity”

• her humanity is gentle, ethereal compared to what we see in the brothers

• Far removed from the brutality of her brothers

• “eye all pale”

• “Paleness”

• lack of passion

• Absence of colour

• She lost meaning in life?

• Verging into death like state

“She weeps alone for pleasures not to be”

Encapsulate Isabella’s despair and foreshadow the tragic turn of events

• “ to kill Lorenzo and there bury him”

• “Serpents”

• dynamic verbs to describe their actions they will take

• Snakes - how they are described

• “weary hand did swelt”

• “Red lined account”

• “ in blood from stinging whip”

• “All naked to the hungry shark”

• workers getting injured

• Vulnerable

• Workers at the brothers peril

• Exploited

• Mistreated

• Wealth built on violence, blood

• “vision”

• “Shed one tear”

• readers may be reminded here of L’s “vision” telling Isabella to “shed one tear” for him yet she doing much more than that - turn serve to foreshadow her unfortunate fate as she seems to disregard his wishes for her own selfish grieving

“And she forgot the stars, the moon and sun”

• the idea of Isabella forgetting the ‘stars, the moon and sun’ may represent the passing of time as well as nature and how this is now lost to her

• Also exemplified by later line in this stanza that “she has no knowledge when the day was done”

• Repition of “and she forgot” may serve to emphasise the extent of the impact that Lorenzo death has had and how nothing matters to her apart from him

“Native lily“

• Lily often seen at funerals as if Isabella begins interest the world of the dead during this ritual

• Lily is described by a pre-modifier “native” is perhaps Keats way of exploiting the idea love at the root of pain. The innate sense of death which we recieve through the phrase “native lily” compels us as a reader to question whether Isabella and Lorenzo’s love was doomed from the start

• In displaying this Keats allows the reader to critique love as a concept and its flaws

“Thou art leading me from wintry cold”

“Thou leadest me to summer clime”

• love has the ability to change lorenzo’s physical temp from cold to warm

• ‘Wintry’ represents his life before Isabella

• When she enters his life she ‘leads’ him into a ‘summer clime’ - metaphor for life and warmth

• Foreshadows that their love will end like summer does and both die from winter