Desert Island Poems: 'Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art' by John Keats

'Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art'

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”

By John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 stedfast, 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.

I’ve written before about my love of the sonnet form in a post linked here, so it might not come as a surprise that I’ve chosen this one by Keats, first published in 1838 in The Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal but now so famous that it's been used for the title of the poet's biopic. Don Paterson, one of the finest living sonneteers and writers about the sonnet, in his 101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney, wrote that to a poet the form of the sonnet is ‘a box for their dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take.’

Not only is this poem a sonnet, but it’s about a star, something else I’ve written about at length in this piece about how and why I write. But, while this poem by Keats has a personal resonance, I think it also represents the best qualities of his as a poet and speaks to some universal concerns in an intensely emotive and memorable way.

Big Ideas

‘Bright star…’ is associated with Keats' later period and encapsulates many of his lifelong concerns - beauty; the ephemeral nature of life; death; the natural world; and language itself.

Opening Line

This poem is a lesson in how to write an opening line. I find it interesting how Keats, particularly in his later poems, stopped giving his poems titles and let first lines operate as titles (see ‘This living hand, now warm and capable…’ for example). Was this because he couldn’t be bothered titling his poems, or simply because he was so proud of his opening lines? We’ll never really know, but it’s an interesting one to ponder. ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘To Autumn’ and ‘Endymion’ show us that Keats was not averse to titling his poems, so the transition is one to be explored. At any rate, it’s an intriguing opening line. First of all, we notice that he’s given prominence to ‘Bright star’ right at the start of the line. The line could have ran ‘Would I were stedfast as thou art, Bright star…’ but it doesn’t have the same urgency, largely due to the iambic nature of ‘Would I’ as opposed to the spondaic nature of ‘Bright star’, two stressed syllables that shoot across the poem’s opening, with the ‘st’ of star being picked up by ‘stedfast’ later in the line. By giving prominence to the star here, Keats wants to make no mistake in the addressee of the poem and foreground this image in the reader’s minds. It also sets up the tone of the poem, which is addressing, not just an element of nature, but an element which at its heart has a strange contradiction: stars last for a long time, but ultimately die. So, it seems strage then that Keats wants to be as stedfast as a star, as in many ways, stars are not really that stedfast. They are stedfast in relation to human life, though, and I think this is what Keats is really driving at. Keats in the poem seems to be searching for eternal life in order to enjoy more of life and the sensuous and sensory pleasures that brings with it. So, with this first line he is bemoaning the transience of human existence in relation to the semi-permanence of the natural world. The word ‘stedfast’ is an interesting choice, which stands out in a line which is largely a mix of pretty boring personal pronouns (I, thou) and auxiliary verbs (would, were, art). ‘Stedfast’ then really stands out. While it has many meanings, Keats on the ninth line clarifies what he means by it when he writes ‘unchangeable’. Keats has no intention, as he outlines in lines 2-8, to be dangling in the sky and passively watching the world, but ‘pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast’. The permanence that he longs for is corporeal, the permanence of touch and interaction, otherwise he’d rather ‘swoon to death.’ There is a deep frustration from Keats that his life will expire and that the moment cannot be held and captured and prolonged, and so much of this is expressed through the subtleties of the poem’s first line.

The Clause

Another wonder of this poem is how Keats manages to keep the clause running after the first line all the way to the volta and the ninth line’s big ‘No’, which arrives like a door shut in our faces. Some critics of this poem may well see lines 2-8 as filler where Keats simply describes what a star sees from its position ‘hung aloft the night’. So, the question I want to ask is: what is the purpose of all this description? How does it earn its keep in the poem? I think for me this poem works so perfectly because of the contrast between the octet (the first eight lines) and the sestet (the concluding six lines). Keats not only writes a good poem here with lots of big ideas, but gives us a masterclass in fully utilising the contrast that can be achieved within the sonnet’s technical bounds; like all great sonnets it advances the form by doing something original with it, and that originality is found in how Keats make the most of the contrast that can be achieved between the two parts of the poem. This is not to say the octet is devoid of important, carefully chosen imagery. What strikes me, in fact, is Keats’s use of bodily imagery, and how he sees the earth itself as being washed by the shore in a ‘priestlike task/ of pure ablution’ with an ablution being a ceremonial, in this case, religious washing of the body. We also get ‘lids’ and the ‘soft-fallen mask/ of snow’ which then leads into ‘the ripening breast’ of the poem’s climax and the ‘tender-taken breath’.

So, with this clause, Keats takes seven lines to tell us the ways in which he does not want to be steadfast - it’s a very careful and deliberate act of clarification which leads to a booming finale.

The Ending

On that note, is the climax of this poem a bit much? Is its ending a bit melodramatic with the repetition of ‘still’ and the rhyming couplet of ‘death’ and ‘breath’? Does Keats seriously get away with the term ‘or else swoon to death’? This is where I think the poem is very much a product of its time. It’s hard to see anyone writing like this now and being taken seriously, but, that said, I do believe last lines are earned, and that Keats has earned the right to such an exclamatory ending through his navigation of the sonnet form up to that point. Had there been a weak point in the poem, a creaky rhyme, enjambment, image or line, this is when the ending of a poem can crumble away, however Keats works the form so beautifully in moving from the clause of the octet to the assertion in the sestet, with each line being so distilled in its language and choice of imagery, that the ending fits perfectly, and give the poems an overall sense of balance. The verb swoon is an interesting choice, as it holds two very different meanings: 1. To faint from extreme emotion. 2. To be overcome with a strong emotion such as admiration. Either way, it is through the contrast between the star ‘hung aloft’ at the start and the idea of the ‘swoon’ tumbling to earth through fainting at the end of the poem, which creates the tension and ultimately brings the reader back down to earth at the end. It is a prime example of the dying fall at the end of a poem, literally and figuratively.

So, in 14 lines Keats takes us from the highest heights of the ‘bright star’ then down to ‘earth’s human shores’ and ‘the mountains and moors’, to the ‘ripening breast’ of his lover’ until finally we are faced with the ‘swoon to death’. The poem is a descent from dreaminess of imagination to the hard reality of our transient existence. But, the sonnet really is a moment’s monument (to quoe Dante Gabriel Rosettie) and as with the most memorable sonnets, Keats uses the form to capture the fleeting nature of things in 14 immortal, enduring lines, to the point where his sonnet itself becomes the ‘bright star’.