Drama and further texts: John Keats: ‘Lamia’, ‘Isabella or The Pot of…

The idea

These four Keats poems give you a pre-1900 tragic core. ‘Lamia’ traces a serpent-woman made human whose wedding collapses when Apollonius exposes her, so Lycius dies. ‘Isabella’ shows a woman who buries her murdered lover’s head in a pot of basil and pines away. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ presents a knight lured by a fairy woman and left on a cold hillside. ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ follows Porphyro and Madeline through ritual and elopement, shadowed by age, cold and death. Read each for the tragic pattern: desire, transgression, revelation, loss. Track how Keats uses form, imagery and setting to make suffering feel inevitable yet avoidable, and compare how knowledge destroys happiness.

What earns the marks

• Analyse how each poem constructs a tragic trajectory from desire through transgression to revelation and loss, using specific textual moments.
• Examine Keats’s use of form and structure, such as the Spenserian stanzas of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ and the ballad measure of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, to shape tragic effect.
• Discuss the role of knowledge and exposure, for example Apollonius’s gaze in ‘Lamia’ or the brothers’ discovery in ‘Isabella’, as agents of catastrophe.
• Consider how setting and atmosphere, including the cold hillside, the Gothic castle and the pot of basil, embody tragic isolation and decay.
• Explore the presentation of women and power, weighing whether Lamia, Isabella and the belle dame are victims, agents or both.
• Connect the poems to wider tragic conventions such as hamartia, peripeteia and the sublime, while recognising Keats’s Romantic reworking of them.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Treating the poems as love lyrics only.

  Put it right by identifying the tragic movement from illusion to disillusionment in each text.

• Retelling plot without quotation.

  Put it right by embedding short, precise quotations and analysing individual words and images.

• Assuming all four poems share one identical tragic pattern.

  Put it right by noting differences, such as the social critique in ‘Isabella’ versus the dream vision in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.

Exam tips

• Plan around the tragic genre named in the question, selecting two or three poems that let you compare closely rather than surveying all four thinly.
• Integrate contextual points about Romanticism, class and gender only where they sharpen your reading of the tragedy.
• Use subject terminology accurately, naming stanza form, caesura, enjambment and imagery when you explain effects.