# Iseult — Poetry character guide

> Iseult in Poetry by Matthew Arnold.

**Role:** major

**Also known as:** The young surviving Iseult

**First appearance:** 0001-i

## Snapshot

The Irish princess whose love for Tristram survives his marriage to another and her own to a king.

## Who they are

Iseult of Ireland is bound to Tristram by a passion older and stronger than the political marriage that delivers her to King Marc, and Arnold's narrator circles her as the figure whose image no artist can restore — 'the ineffable smile of her eyes.' Her tragedy is that she is loved and loving in a world where love cools: the poem's speaker watches Tristram's eye grow cold to mere beauty and knows the drift toward fatigue and dejection is coming. She matters because her constancy is the counterweight to Tristram's restlessness, the still point around which the Tristram poems' grief turns.

## Relationships

### [Tristram](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_16_se/characters/tristram)

_romantic_

Iseult and Tristram are tragic lovers bound by a love potion, caught between passion and duty in Arthurian legend.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_16_se/characters/iseult
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_16_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_16_se/characters