Bright Star

In his Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats (1795-1821) hears the bird’s immortal song descending to him through the ages and pines for the immortality the song symbolizes:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
  No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
  In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
         The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Keats’s English sonnet, Bright Star, initially composed sometime between February and December of 1819, was written for Fanny Brawne to whom Keats was engaged. It also meditates on immortality, this time employing symbolism of the North Star. Certain words and images of the poem are present in an earlier letter (June 25, 1818) he wrote to his brother Tom while he toured Lake Windermere in the Lake District of northern England: “The two views [of the lake], we have had of it are the most noble tenderness—they can never fade away…[they] refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star which one can never cease to be open-lidded and steadfast over the wonders of the great powers.” As Keats traveled to Italy in the autumn of 1820, in an attempt to restore his failing health, he revised the sonnet and wrote it into his copy of Shakespeare’s poems. It has been suggested that it is the last poem Keats wrote before his death February 23, 1821.

Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou art

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
  Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
  Like nature's patient, sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
  Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The sonnet begins with a typical Keatsian idea, the desire to escape mortality. Keats’s normal longing for “permanence” was intensified by the death of his brother Tom, whom he cared for during his final illness and death from tuberculosis December 1, 1818. As Keats works through his thought process in the poem, we see an initial statement expressing his wish. Keats gazes on the north star and desires to also have the eternity the star represents: Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art-” But the moment that thought settles in the reader’s mind, Keats counters it with an essential, emotional qualification, “No.” The star watches in “lone splendor,” isolated like a hermit. It may be constant,” a state of being for which Keats yearns, but without the possibility of the joy of human passion and love.

In the sestet, Keats shifts from the “star” image in the octave to an image of the lovers in one another’s arms in the sestet:

 No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
  Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
  Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
and so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Here, Keats rises and falls in an imaginative and realistic pattern. First, he pictures his head “Pillow’d upon my love’s ripening breast” quieting his fears about mortality as he feels the “soft swell and fall” and listens to “her tender-taken breath”. Momentarily, he conjectures he can “live-[for]ever,” but the thought vanishes immediately and life’s gravity pulls him downward “to swoon to death.” Passion and love ease Keats’s anxiety but cannot dispel the weight of reality, though his poem defies time’s “fell hand.”