Themes
Concept of permanence
Power of nature-Sublime [deification of nature]
Paradox-wants permanence of love
Conflict
Ephemeral nature of human experience Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art
Context
Written in late July 1819- madly in love with Fanny Brawne. This poem was then revised
(small changes made) just before he died.
Shakespearean Sonnet- links to Sonnet 116 which mentions love as being like the North
Star- an ‘ever fixed mark’
The poem’s opening four lines have been compared to Keats’ description of Lake
Windermere in his letter to his brother Tom in June 1818:
‘the two views we have had of [the lake] are of the most noble tenderness – they can never
fade away – they make one forget the divisions of life; age, youth, poverty and riches;’
Again explores the ideas of permanence of nature and the transience of human experience
(particularly romantic experiences)
“Bright Star” is a sonnet by the British Romantic poet John Keats. Written in 1818 or 1819,
the poem is a passionate declaration of undying, constant love. The speaker wants to be
“stedfast”—constant and unchanging—like the “bright star” described in the poem’s first
eight lines. But, unlike the “bright star,” the speaker does not want to be isolated or distant
from human life: instead, the speaker wants to spend eternity locked in a passionate
embrace with his or her lover. The speaker fantasizes about this unchanging love—but it's
not clear whether it can actually be achieved in real life. As the speaker acknowledges in
the poem's final line, his or her fantasy is fragile, threatened by the death and change that
eventually overwhelm all human beings.
Meaning
The speaker addresses the North Star which appears unchanging in the night sky. He
begins by saying that he wishes he were as ‘steadfast’ as the star – but then he says
that he does not mean he wants to be in ‘lone splendour’ gazing down on the oceans,
the snow-covered mountains and moors. Instead he wants to be steadfast in the sense
of being close to his beloved, pillowed on her breast. He wants never to leave her and
always to be close enough to her to hear her breathing
Most scholars agree that ‘my fair love’ refers to Fanny Brawne, although Keats
biographer Robert Gittings disputes this and thinks it is addressed to Mrs Isabella
Jones, with whom Keats supposedly had an affair.
The evidence supporting Fanny Brawne draws a parallel between this sonnet and lines
in Keats’ letter Lines to Fanny written in July 1819:
I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heothen. Yours
ever, fair Star.
However, as has been pointed out, Keats is here thinking of Fanny as the evening star,
Venus, whereas in the sonnet Keats’ ‘bright star’ is the North Star.
Assuming that the poem is addressed to Fanny, Keats met her in December 1818 and
they declared their love for each other shortly afterwards. They were engaged in
October 1819. Because Keats burned all but her last letters – and these were buried
with him – it is hard to know the precise nature of their relationship. What is clear,
however, is that it was passionate (though probably not sexual) and mutual. It was the
central, intense experience of their lives. Fanny copied out this poem in a volume of
Dante which Keats had given her
Language
The tone changes quite abruptly at the sonnet’s volta, the point where the octave ends and
the sestet begins. The purity and steadfastness of the star image turns into the warm
sensuousness of physical love with images of ‘love’s ripening breast’ rising and falling.
As Keats states (in lines 10-11) that he would rather be steadfastly pillowed on his lover’s
breast (rather than being like the star hanging in splendid isolation in the sky), his choice of
language sensuously suggests the physicality for which he yearns: ‘pillowed’ suggests
cheeks resting on the plumply swelling breast.
The sounds in ‘soft fall and swell’, the sibilants and the softness of the ‘f’ and ‘sw’ sounds,
enact the tenderness of the act of laying his cheek upon the breast.
Structure
, This Shakespearean sonnet is constructed around the contrast of cold isolation and warm
communion. The octave focuses on the image of the ‘bright star’, traditionally an image of
permanence, which has its appeal when considering enduring love. However, the
personified star is rejected as the sonnet moves into the sestet. This turn (or volta) is
indicated by the emphatic word ‘No’.
From this point onwards the sonnet becomes much warmer in tone and language as the
speaker paints an erotic image of himself pillowed on his lover’s breast.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’ is a lyric poem and, particularly, a sonnet.
Keats follows the thought-pattern of the Italian sonnet (octave & sestet). An important
thing to note is that the division of the poem into octave and sestet is emphasized by a
very prominent turn between the sections. Keats has chosen a sonnet as his preferred form
here, but it seems a mix between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean. Traditionally in the
former, an idea is set out in the octave (the first eight lines) and is resolved in the sestet.
Keats’ sonnet follows this pattern in that there is a clear volta (or tone change) in line nine.
Imagery and Symbolism
The star personifies a quiet and universal fixedness, the limitations of which are implied
even as the star itself is praised. Shakespeare had used the same image in Julius Caesar
when Caesar likens himself to the pole star:
But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks;
They are all fire and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
And Shakespeare also celebrates love using similar imagery in Sonnet 116:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixéd mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Despite these positive associations, although the star may be unchangingly lovely it has a ‘lone
splendour’. Likening it to an ‘Eremite’ emphasises the sense of the star’s removal from the tangible
world of humanity. Although attentive, its beneficent oversight of the world is ultimately passive.
By contrast, Keats wants to be fully in contact with the beloved over whom he watches - ‘Pillow’d’
conveys the sense of sinking down within the ‘fall and swell’ of his girlfriend’s bosoms. However,
both the star and Keats share an inability to sleep – the star because of her role as the world’s
overseer; Keats because he is in a state of erotic ‘sweet unrest’.
Themes
In this sonnet Keats reflects on the discontinuity between man and nature, as well as a
longing for identification. The poet aspires to the fixed and ethereal beauty of the star, yet
is aware of its limitations: though bright, steadfast and splendid, it is at the same time
solitary and non-human.
As so often in Keats’ poems, there is a tension between what is ‘still steadfast, still
unchangeable’ and the restlessness of romantic passion. The permanent and the eternal
may constitute an ideal but Keats is also aware that to attain such a state is impossible.
The human heart can never be tranquil like the star, for human emotions know the conflict
of joy and pain. Ultimately desire and death are inseparable.
Humans may desire the steadfastness of the stars only in a paradoxical ’sweet unrest’, an
ecstasy of passion both intense and annihilating, a kind of ‘swoon to death’, fulfilling but
inhumanly ‘unchangeable’.
, In Drear-nighted December
Context
Negative Capability: The ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try to
reconcile its contradictory aspects or fir it into closed and rational systems
Letter to Tom and George (brothers)- December 1817
Poem is reflecting about the steadiness of nature irrespective of the changes. John Keats
contrasts the steadiness with the inconsistencies of man amongst the changing nature of
the world. This poem was written in 1817.
Meaning
In this beautiful, neatly constructed poem, Keats praises nature, even in the depth of
winter; a typical feature of the Romantic poets and Keats in particular.
'In drear-nighted December' by John Keats describes the way in which memories of happier
and warmer times impact one in the darkest and coldest hours of December. The poem
begins with the speaker describing the way a tree is able to live.
Keats poem examines the idea that the worst part of suffering is often to remember a time
when we were happy. He would have found this idea In the words of Francesca da Rimini in
Dante’s Inferno
*Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseri
[No greater torment than to remember happy times in misery]
Summary
In the first stanza, he looks at a frozen sleety tree with bare branches and thinks about how
the tree is just fine. It is not at all upset in its current state even though it once had
beautiful leaves, and the reason this is possible is that the tree has no memory of that
better time. None the wiser, the tree is content, and it will bloom again in the spring
without fear of losing the leaves, and the cycle continues.
Next, in the second stanza, the speaker’s attention turns to a frozen brook. In a similar
way, he considers how lucky the brook is that it has no memory of the happy time when it
once flowed freely. Even encased in an icy prison, the brook is perfectly happy because of
the “sweet forgetting.” The brook has no memory of Apollo in his hot “summer look”, so it
is happy even in a less comfortable situation
In the final stanza, the speaker laments that people don’t have this ability to forget, too.
Instead, we all are doomed to writhe in the pain of remembering happy times before our
heartbreak, and there is nothing that can be done to ease the pain.
This poem looks at how poignant romantic heartbreak is. It is one of my favourite poems
reflecting on heartbreak and that hopeless anguish that feels so suffocating. It captures
that despair, doesn’t apologize, and doesn’t offer hope. Keats knows that when you are
heartbroken, you don’t want to hear people trying to cheer you up.
Heartbreak sucks, and you can feel as lousy as you want without feeling guilty about it. Go
ahead and wallow in it for a while. It’s okay.
Keats says it is okay, and he is like the best poet who ever lived.
Structure
The poem comprises three stanzas of eight lines each. There is a complex structure which
creates a song-like rhythm. The first four lines of each stanza have 7,6,7,6 syllables— a
quatrain with an ABAB rhyme scheme — followed by lines with 7,7,7 and 6 syllables each
and a CCCE rhyme scheme. The clever feat that Keats pulls off is that the last line of each
stanza rhymes; ‘prime’, ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’. The effect is subtle and gives the poem
coherence, while the reader may not be aware of how it is achieved.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a third person narrator, whom we can take to be the poet. Only
the emotive, exclamatory ‘Ah’ in the third stanza gives a hint of a personal
involvement. Keats uses sensuous imagery in this, as in all his poems. He uses
adjectives to depict a silent frozen night in which a tree and a brook are ‘happy’
Concept of permanence
Power of nature-Sublime [deification of nature]
Paradox-wants permanence of love
Conflict
Ephemeral nature of human experience Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art
Context
Written in late July 1819- madly in love with Fanny Brawne. This poem was then revised
(small changes made) just before he died.
Shakespearean Sonnet- links to Sonnet 116 which mentions love as being like the North
Star- an ‘ever fixed mark’
The poem’s opening four lines have been compared to Keats’ description of Lake
Windermere in his letter to his brother Tom in June 1818:
‘the two views we have had of [the lake] are of the most noble tenderness – they can never
fade away – they make one forget the divisions of life; age, youth, poverty and riches;’
Again explores the ideas of permanence of nature and the transience of human experience
(particularly romantic experiences)
“Bright Star” is a sonnet by the British Romantic poet John Keats. Written in 1818 or 1819,
the poem is a passionate declaration of undying, constant love. The speaker wants to be
“stedfast”—constant and unchanging—like the “bright star” described in the poem’s first
eight lines. But, unlike the “bright star,” the speaker does not want to be isolated or distant
from human life: instead, the speaker wants to spend eternity locked in a passionate
embrace with his or her lover. The speaker fantasizes about this unchanging love—but it's
not clear whether it can actually be achieved in real life. As the speaker acknowledges in
the poem's final line, his or her fantasy is fragile, threatened by the death and change that
eventually overwhelm all human beings.
Meaning
The speaker addresses the North Star which appears unchanging in the night sky. He
begins by saying that he wishes he were as ‘steadfast’ as the star – but then he says
that he does not mean he wants to be in ‘lone splendour’ gazing down on the oceans,
the snow-covered mountains and moors. Instead he wants to be steadfast in the sense
of being close to his beloved, pillowed on her breast. He wants never to leave her and
always to be close enough to her to hear her breathing
Most scholars agree that ‘my fair love’ refers to Fanny Brawne, although Keats
biographer Robert Gittings disputes this and thinks it is addressed to Mrs Isabella
Jones, with whom Keats supposedly had an affair.
The evidence supporting Fanny Brawne draws a parallel between this sonnet and lines
in Keats’ letter Lines to Fanny written in July 1819:
I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heothen. Yours
ever, fair Star.
However, as has been pointed out, Keats is here thinking of Fanny as the evening star,
Venus, whereas in the sonnet Keats’ ‘bright star’ is the North Star.
Assuming that the poem is addressed to Fanny, Keats met her in December 1818 and
they declared their love for each other shortly afterwards. They were engaged in
October 1819. Because Keats burned all but her last letters – and these were buried
with him – it is hard to know the precise nature of their relationship. What is clear,
however, is that it was passionate (though probably not sexual) and mutual. It was the
central, intense experience of their lives. Fanny copied out this poem in a volume of
Dante which Keats had given her
Language
The tone changes quite abruptly at the sonnet’s volta, the point where the octave ends and
the sestet begins. The purity and steadfastness of the star image turns into the warm
sensuousness of physical love with images of ‘love’s ripening breast’ rising and falling.
As Keats states (in lines 10-11) that he would rather be steadfastly pillowed on his lover’s
breast (rather than being like the star hanging in splendid isolation in the sky), his choice of
language sensuously suggests the physicality for which he yearns: ‘pillowed’ suggests
cheeks resting on the plumply swelling breast.
The sounds in ‘soft fall and swell’, the sibilants and the softness of the ‘f’ and ‘sw’ sounds,
enact the tenderness of the act of laying his cheek upon the breast.
Structure
, This Shakespearean sonnet is constructed around the contrast of cold isolation and warm
communion. The octave focuses on the image of the ‘bright star’, traditionally an image of
permanence, which has its appeal when considering enduring love. However, the
personified star is rejected as the sonnet moves into the sestet. This turn (or volta) is
indicated by the emphatic word ‘No’.
From this point onwards the sonnet becomes much warmer in tone and language as the
speaker paints an erotic image of himself pillowed on his lover’s breast.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’ is a lyric poem and, particularly, a sonnet.
Keats follows the thought-pattern of the Italian sonnet (octave & sestet). An important
thing to note is that the division of the poem into octave and sestet is emphasized by a
very prominent turn between the sections. Keats has chosen a sonnet as his preferred form
here, but it seems a mix between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean. Traditionally in the
former, an idea is set out in the octave (the first eight lines) and is resolved in the sestet.
Keats’ sonnet follows this pattern in that there is a clear volta (or tone change) in line nine.
Imagery and Symbolism
The star personifies a quiet and universal fixedness, the limitations of which are implied
even as the star itself is praised. Shakespeare had used the same image in Julius Caesar
when Caesar likens himself to the pole star:
But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks;
They are all fire and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
And Shakespeare also celebrates love using similar imagery in Sonnet 116:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixéd mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Despite these positive associations, although the star may be unchangingly lovely it has a ‘lone
splendour’. Likening it to an ‘Eremite’ emphasises the sense of the star’s removal from the tangible
world of humanity. Although attentive, its beneficent oversight of the world is ultimately passive.
By contrast, Keats wants to be fully in contact with the beloved over whom he watches - ‘Pillow’d’
conveys the sense of sinking down within the ‘fall and swell’ of his girlfriend’s bosoms. However,
both the star and Keats share an inability to sleep – the star because of her role as the world’s
overseer; Keats because he is in a state of erotic ‘sweet unrest’.
Themes
In this sonnet Keats reflects on the discontinuity between man and nature, as well as a
longing for identification. The poet aspires to the fixed and ethereal beauty of the star, yet
is aware of its limitations: though bright, steadfast and splendid, it is at the same time
solitary and non-human.
As so often in Keats’ poems, there is a tension between what is ‘still steadfast, still
unchangeable’ and the restlessness of romantic passion. The permanent and the eternal
may constitute an ideal but Keats is also aware that to attain such a state is impossible.
The human heart can never be tranquil like the star, for human emotions know the conflict
of joy and pain. Ultimately desire and death are inseparable.
Humans may desire the steadfastness of the stars only in a paradoxical ’sweet unrest’, an
ecstasy of passion both intense and annihilating, a kind of ‘swoon to death’, fulfilling but
inhumanly ‘unchangeable’.
, In Drear-nighted December
Context
Negative Capability: The ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try to
reconcile its contradictory aspects or fir it into closed and rational systems
Letter to Tom and George (brothers)- December 1817
Poem is reflecting about the steadiness of nature irrespective of the changes. John Keats
contrasts the steadiness with the inconsistencies of man amongst the changing nature of
the world. This poem was written in 1817.
Meaning
In this beautiful, neatly constructed poem, Keats praises nature, even in the depth of
winter; a typical feature of the Romantic poets and Keats in particular.
'In drear-nighted December' by John Keats describes the way in which memories of happier
and warmer times impact one in the darkest and coldest hours of December. The poem
begins with the speaker describing the way a tree is able to live.
Keats poem examines the idea that the worst part of suffering is often to remember a time
when we were happy. He would have found this idea In the words of Francesca da Rimini in
Dante’s Inferno
*Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseri
[No greater torment than to remember happy times in misery]
Summary
In the first stanza, he looks at a frozen sleety tree with bare branches and thinks about how
the tree is just fine. It is not at all upset in its current state even though it once had
beautiful leaves, and the reason this is possible is that the tree has no memory of that
better time. None the wiser, the tree is content, and it will bloom again in the spring
without fear of losing the leaves, and the cycle continues.
Next, in the second stanza, the speaker’s attention turns to a frozen brook. In a similar
way, he considers how lucky the brook is that it has no memory of the happy time when it
once flowed freely. Even encased in an icy prison, the brook is perfectly happy because of
the “sweet forgetting.” The brook has no memory of Apollo in his hot “summer look”, so it
is happy even in a less comfortable situation
In the final stanza, the speaker laments that people don’t have this ability to forget, too.
Instead, we all are doomed to writhe in the pain of remembering happy times before our
heartbreak, and there is nothing that can be done to ease the pain.
This poem looks at how poignant romantic heartbreak is. It is one of my favourite poems
reflecting on heartbreak and that hopeless anguish that feels so suffocating. It captures
that despair, doesn’t apologize, and doesn’t offer hope. Keats knows that when you are
heartbroken, you don’t want to hear people trying to cheer you up.
Heartbreak sucks, and you can feel as lousy as you want without feeling guilty about it. Go
ahead and wallow in it for a while. It’s okay.
Keats says it is okay, and he is like the best poet who ever lived.
Structure
The poem comprises three stanzas of eight lines each. There is a complex structure which
creates a song-like rhythm. The first four lines of each stanza have 7,6,7,6 syllables— a
quatrain with an ABAB rhyme scheme — followed by lines with 7,7,7 and 6 syllables each
and a CCCE rhyme scheme. The clever feat that Keats pulls off is that the last line of each
stanza rhymes; ‘prime’, ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’. The effect is subtle and gives the poem
coherence, while the reader may not be aware of how it is achieved.
Language and Imagery
The voice is that of a third person narrator, whom we can take to be the poet. Only
the emotive, exclamatory ‘Ah’ in the third stanza gives a hint of a personal
involvement. Keats uses sensuous imagery in this, as in all his poems. He uses
adjectives to depict a silent frozen night in which a tree and a brook are ‘happy’
