“The poetry of earth is never dead.”~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.

A 2009 movie called Bright Star tells of the tragic love between John Keats and his neighbor, Fanny Brawne, throughout the years in which Keats wrote several of his most celebrated poems, including this sonnet. This sonnet may or may not have been written specifically for Fanny, but it is similar to these words from a letter Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne: “I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen. Your’s ever, fair Star.”