covering the mountains is precise and accurate, while the alliteration of ‘mountains’ and ‘moors’ seems to encompass the vast landscape of Earth as seen from space.
In the sestet (the third quatrain and the rhyming couplet) there is a classic Petrarchan volta or turn. The speaker tells us where he would most like to be. Although he wishes to be as unchangeable as the North Star, he does not want to be alone in the heavens. Instead, he wishes to be ‘Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast’. While ‘pillow’d’ here means cushioned, it also suggests bed and intimacy. The sensuous language in the sestet is in complete contrast to the austere and distant language in the octet. The speaker wishes to lie on his lover’s chest and feel the rise and fall of her breathing forever: ‘To feel for ever its soft fall and swell’. Keats and Fanny Brawne lived in a time of chaperones and little opportunity to be alone (despite being next-door neighbours), and their growing passion must have been all consuming. The speaker knows he could never sleep peacefully if his love was beside him – ‘Awake for ever in a sweet unrest’ – but would instead lie awake listening to her gentle breath: ‘Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath’. His deep love is seen in his desire to ‘live ever’ in his lover’s arms, while his passion is seen in his equally strong desire to ‘swoon to death.’
The film Bright Star by the Australian director Jane Campion is a fictional account of the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Its title comes from this poem, and it is an interesting imagining of their relationship, and gives a good sense of the England of Keats’ era – the setting, lifestyle and even the types of clothing worn in the early nineteenth century. Many of Keats’ poems on the Leaving Certificate course, including ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art’, are used throughout the film to help tell this tragic love story.
