John Keats

“Bright Star” by John Keats is a great work that expresses his love for someone by describing his jealousy for the steadfastness of a star.

“Bright Star, would I were stedfast as thow art” (ln 1)

He describes the star as watching “with eternal lids apart, like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite.” In his description, the star is watching the world, always awake, always shining brightly. It is patient and unchanging, something that the speaker can always count on to watch over. Keats then describes all that the star is watching.

“The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen masque
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors” (ln 5-8)

The star is watching the waters moving with a religious purpose. The water is purifying the ground underneath it as it rushes over the ground washing its surface. In addition, the snow can also be seen as purifying the ground beneath it as it masks the mountains and moors.

In the next lines, the scene changes to the speaker and his love.

“pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, to feel for ever its soft swell and fall” (ln 10-11)

He wishes to be like the star, steadfast in its ways, so that he may be able to stay as he is now forever. The rise and fall of her breast seems peaceful and everlasting to him in that moment.

In the last two lines, he gives two possibilities for himself.

“Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death” (ln 14-15)

In his eyes he has two options. Either he can either be in love forever with this woman, or what seems like forever, or he can die when he is at his utmost happiness from swooning to death. Either way, his eternal bliss of loving this woman will be everlasting and “steadfast.”

It is interesting that Keats compares the steadfastness of the “bright star” in the sky to the feeling he has when he is with his love. He wants to have the same steadfastness that the star has, with its lids always open, always watching the Earth beneath it. In this same sense, he wishes for the feelings for his love and the happiness that he feels to be unchanging and everlasting.