Bright Star – For The Love Of Poems …

If you love art-house type of movies, especially on the topic of poetry, you may find the highly acclaimed “Bright Star” a movie worth checking out.  A story based on the life of the poet John Keats and his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne, set in the year 1818.  The drama can be intense, and the words from Keats’s poems and letters are interjected naturally into the some parts of the scripts.  It may take some time to understand how the roles relate to one another (you know how it is like to start reading a novel only found yourself hopelessly lost on the first chapter?), but patience pays off for this 2 hours long movie.  It shows that the historical background is well researched.  And the scripts are intelligently written with subtle cues that may please those who pay attention to the words.  I have to admit that it is hard to digest, or even to appreciate the words of the poems at first listen.  Those who come from English Literature background may be in a better position than me.  Occasionally, I read Shakespeare’s works.  But still, poems require time to appreciate.  Certainly not in a duration of merely 2 hours.

And because “Bright Star” is based on a true story, there is always one camp of audience who wishes the story to be resolved a different way and another camp who critics on the accuracy of the research effort.  Also, the pace of “Bright Star” can be slow and the overall mood can be depressing, at times painful even to watch.  To that extend, it may not be a film for everybody.  As for me, after watching “Bright Star”, I did some research on the life and work of John Keats.  His poems seem beautiful.  You too should check them out.

Below is “Bright Star”, the poem, as found in Wikipedia.

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 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.