bright star

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--

Not in lone splendour 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 stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

--John Keats.

It's interesting what happens to the husbands, wives, lovers, of poets who died young. John Keats went off to Italy in a desperate, unavailing search for health, and soon died there, of consumption. A lock of hair of Fanny Brawne, his fiancee, was buried with him. When dying, he said bitterly, 'If I had had her, I would have lived.' Of course he was wrong.

Fanny went on to marry a sales agent in London, and bear him three children; she outlived her early lover by forty four years. A solid, bourgeois, Victorian matriarch; yet to Keats' fading vision, the soul of fragile beauty, his Muse. My sonnet about her has some verbal echoes of his great sonnet 'Bright Star'. ..

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art…

I’m afraid I read trashy, trumpety novels; art
Does not obsess me or Mr Lindon either.
Does hair turn grey when it’s somewhere else, apart?
I’ve read his letters when I’ve lain sleepless.
They’re very moving; he loved me so much,
Though quite violently. Thank God I stayed pure
For Mr Lindon. His friend showed me his death-mask:
Weird –his face, yet it bore no resemblance
To the young poet I allowed to stroke my breast
Once; and felt him swell… well, you know—men.
Hearing him cough next door, I couldn’t rest…
‘Tender is the night’… That’s in an Ode;
I remember that. I’d be Mrs Keats if he’d lived.


Note: Fanny Brawne (1800-1865), Keats’s fiancée, married a sales agent, Louis Lindon, and bore him three children. Keats had a lock of her hair buried with him.