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.

 

 

Addressed to a star (perhaps Polaris, around which the heavens appear to wheel), the sonnet expresses the poet's wish to be as constant as the star while he presses against his sleeping love. The use of the star imagery is unusual in that Keats dismisses many of its more apparent qualities, focusing on the star's steadfast and passively watchful nature. In the first recorded draft (copied by Charles Brown and dated to early 1819), the poet loves unto death; by the final version, death is an alternative to (ephemeral) love.

The poem is punctuated as a single sentence and uses the rhyme form of the Shakespearean sonnet (ABABCDCDEFEFGG) with the customary volta, or turn in the train of thought, occurring after the octave.

(from Wiki)

From Jane Campion's "Bright Star"

1:11  opening

0:19:50 human orchestra: Mozart's Serenade No 10 "Gran Partita"

0:53:45 Ode to a Nightingale

1:11:18 Bright Star

1: 51:48 Bright Star