bright star

I love the sonnet more than any other poetic form except possibly the villanelle, and I haven't posted a single one so far this year. This does happen—sometimes I get caught up in feelings and free verse, and fall down on the job when it comes to form—but sonnets are very important to me, and so is this dude called John Keats.

Bright star, would I were steadfast 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 steadfast, 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 (1795-1821), "Bright Star," 1820.

This is the revised version of "Bright Star," copied by Keats into "his volume of Shakespeare c. October 1, 1820, when he and Severn were on their way to Italy. Brown's draft of the first version was dated 1819" (note on "Bright Star," Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats, edited by Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 342). Bush's notes are hilarious, and certainly out of date, but I agree with him that the revised version of the sonnet is better than the first draft. It's still not my favorite of Keats' sonnets, though I appreciate the weird shit he does with the rhymes; but that first line is famous, and I think it's certainly worth reading the rest of the poem. Plus, sonnets.