John Keats's "Bright Star": Romantic Poetry and Romance Film

In the past few months readers have witnessed a series of events that have renewed interest in the brief life and influential works of John Keats. In the spring W.W. Norton published Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats: a Personal Biography, a wonderful book concerning the English Romantic poet who died at the age of 25 in 1821. This weekend a greatly refurbished villa home of John Keats in Hampstead, North London—where a number of Keats’s famous poems were composed—has been reopened to the public. An important development in Keats’s life also occurred at that house, since it is the location where he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who inspired some of his most emotional lyrics. The two were engaged but never married due to Keats’s worsening health and early death.

Now, a new Jane Campion film, Bright Star, focusing on John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, is in the process of being released. Readers can view a promotional preview clip above. The film’s title arises from Keats’s magnificent poem by the same name (below), composed in 1819-1820 and believed to be addressed to Fanny Brawne. Campion’s depiction of Keats in Bright Star was warmly received when premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and the work received a nomination for the Golden Palm award. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turin described the movie as “one of the most deeply moving romantic films in memory,” perhaps allowing readers to apply the term “romantic” in more than one manner. Bright Star will be presented at various venues, such as the Toronto Film Festival, in the upcoming months and then will be available for general public release this fall.

BRIGHT STAR

Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 masque
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 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.


—John Keats