"Bright Star" by John Keats

“Bright Star” by 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 live so ever – or else swoon to death.

The final line in John Keats’s “Bright Star” is ultimately the most important. The narrator’s goes from merely preferring existence with lover to needing it, lest he “swoon to death.” While most of the poem seems rather light, the tone changes in this final couplet, which Keats employs to draw attention, as it differs from the alternating rhyme scheme of the rest of the poem. Musings about a pretty evening star turn into life-or-death matters, revealing how important the poet’s lover must be to him. He prefers the presence and touch of his lover to the remarkable steadfastness of the star. He personifies the star in order to truly realize what its existence is like, using words like “watching” and “gazing” to make the star seem human. Further, the narrator speaks so peacefully and admiringly of the star in the first section of the poem so that a life more ideal to him seems unimaginable; but he speaks of his lover in the second section to emphasize that though he fantasizes about life as a splendorous star, life by lover’s side is still more perfect. He would rather listen to the sound of her breathing than look over dazzling snow-covered mountains and listen to babbling waters. Moreover, he must feel her chest’s “soft fall and swell,” or he will most certainly die.