Year 11 Literature
Romantic Poetry: “Bright Star” By John Keats
By Natalie Hind
“Bright Star” is a Shakespearean sonnet with a Volta present after the eighth line. The poem is written in the form of one long sentence, perhaps symbolic of a star’s everlasting nature. The poem is made up of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. “Bright Star” has a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG.
“Bright Star” by John Keats, is able to express several different readings. One reading can be that Keats is expressing a more sensual idea about how he wants to be in the height of sexual pleasure for all of time. However, the more apparent and overall more romantic reading is that of the poet’s desire to be like a star in that is unmoving and eternal. At the beginning of the poem, the persona talks about how he wishes to be “…steadfast as [a star]…” conveying his desire to be unchanging and everlasting. He then goes on to say that though he wishes he were unmoving like the stars, he does not want to exist alone up in the sky, always “Watching, with eternal lids apart”. Keats would rather be “Awake for ever” and “Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast”. These lines convey the persona’s reason for wanting an everlasting existence – so that he can be with his love for all time. Unfortunately these two desires of being unmoving and for ever in love can not coexist, as to love he must be human, and not an everlasting being such as the star. The persona reveals his awareness of this during the last line of the poem, where he seems to see only one other possibility and that is to “swoon to death”. “Bright Star” has a melancholic tone, expressed through his desire to experience a life that never moves forward, while forever experiencing love, passion and sensuality. The impossibility of this desire is effective in conveying the tone.
