Bright Star

Last night, I watched a very good movie that (again) made me cry with the occasional interludes of a sigh. I saw "Bright Star" and just like any other period drama/ movie I have seen, it cut through me and wedged my heart. The words of John Keats are like sugar drops, pleasurably sweet yet makes me so very well guilty. The title of the movie was derived from his poem of the same name. The story is about his first and only love, the flirtatious Fanny Brawn, their next door neighbor.

John Keats on the Treetops trying to relive his "dream"



I used to brush away John Keats during the entire course of my English Literature subject. Maybe because we never really delved into the mind and the nature of his poetry, the power of his words, the thought and meaning underlying in a stanza or two of his "The Eve of Saint Agnes" poem. He was an object of my passive study and the gist of my careless thinking and I never knew the difference he would make to a girl who first jilted the beauty of his poetry.

At 25, he passed away, lost his life to tuberculosis which killed his mother and two other siblings. His life, as a writer, is not what he talks. Maybe this applies to every writer, especially to a poet. His life was not full of mystery and adventure and happiness as what are implied in his poetry but rather it was uneventful. He even considered himself a failure but now he is one of the most famous romantic English writers.

"A poet is not at all poetical. He is the most un-poetical thing in existence.
He has no identity. He is continually filling some other body,the sun, the moon."


"A poem needs understanding through the senses.
The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the Lake,
to luxuriate in the sensation of water.
You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought.
Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."


I'm going back to my materials on English Literature and read Keats again. In the meantime,
all I can say is that, I failed John Keats. I did not know til now how tightly he wound himself
around my heart.