Today I thought of a movie I saw a while ago. “Bright Star” by Jane Campion. It is the tale of the English poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, his fiancé and muse, forever antagonised by Charles Brown, Keat’s friend and mentor. Keats died very young and left a fairly small body of poetry, which nevertheless is considered to be one of the most influential of English literature. In “Bright Star”, John Keats and Fanny Brawne discover seeing themselves in the other. They encounter true love and they experience themselves, which is accentuated by a longing of the heart, whenever they feel separated.

Here are a few examples….

A room of butterflies

Affection of the heart

Through the Wall

Jane Campion on Bright Star

Bright Star (a poem by 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.