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About

Genius Annotation

Keasts has been described as one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, along with Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.

Romantic Poetry

A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had not long ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. In England the infamous Peterloo Massacre had occurred in August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd demonstrating against poor economic conditions and lack of parliamentary representation in the north of England. To name the period ‘Romantic’ is ironic, given the terrible social and economic conditions of poor people at the time

“Bright Star” is a love sonnet written by John Keats. The exact date of composition is uncertain as it was published after his death in 1838. It expresses mingled religious and romantic longing and uncertainty over which path offers true absolution.

Typical of the Romantics, Keats addresses the star rhetorically, not expecting a reply. This poem places the reader up in the night sky. What follows is descent, from celestial reserve to earthly nature to human contact.

The question is how to interpret this descent; what might be the connection between heavenly and human existence? Keats here interweaves religion and sex; both apply to this poem.

While this poem was written, Keats was deeply in love with Fanny Brawne. The bright star represents his love for her, or at least the ideal, steadfast love to which he aspires.

Note Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 about constancy in love:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken[It is the star to every wandering bark,

Also it’s the title for the 2009 Jane Campion film about Keats’s life.

All that said, this poem is arguably stronger if the reader forgets about biographical detail and interprets the meaning of the ‘Bright Star’ based on the poem’s own symbols and language.

An enduring ‘poetics’ question is whether artwork is better understood using external knowledge or by referring purely to information within the work. See: ‘death of the author.’

As with most artistic theory, these boundaries are fuzzy. Since art constructs symbols out of existing language (alphabetic, visual or otherwise), all art requires some external knowledge to be understood.

Structure
This poem follows a fourteen line sonnet structure, with a rhyme scheme that follows the pattern ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The volta or turn is at the end of line eight, the point at which Keats writes an emphatic ‘No’, and the subject changes its trajectory, turning from flux — flowing water and melting snow — to steadfast and eternal. This makes it a hybrid; a mix of Petrarchan/ Italian sonnet, and English/Shakespearean sonnet. The metrical rhythm is iambic pentameter, that is five metrical feet or iambs per line, where a iamb is one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.

For more on sonnet structure see the explanation in the Glossary of Literary Terms.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

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Release Date
October 22, 1819
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