Bright Star is the
story of the three-year romance of Romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne.
Keats moved next door to the Brawne family in Hampstead, near London, in 1818,
and Fanny, a.k.a. the luckiest teenage girl in the universe, immediately is drawn
to Keats. She is theatrical, creative, and outgoing, and they soon fall in
love. The morals of the time allowed them only time to read together, and to walk
through the woods (accompanied by Fanny’s little brother and sister), and their
love was tame by modern standards, but the intensity of their feelings burns
through the screen. Perhaps they knew
they would only have a brief time together, as Keats began to sicken with TB. It
was during this time that Keats wrote some of his greatest poetry. Meanwhile,
his friend Charles Brown tries to discourage Fanny, feeling that the
relationship could only end in marriage and in Keats being destroyed by the
pedestrian needs of married life. Keats goes to Italy to try to recover from
his illness but dies at the age of 25 on Feb. 26, 1821, and Fanny is left to
wander the nearby heaths in black, mourning.
Ben Whishaw as Keats
and Abbie Cornish as Fanny convey the youth and almost morbid intensity of the
couple as they fall in love.Whishaw, especially, has the daunting task of portraying a
poetic genius, and is convincing. This is what Keats wrote to Fanny:
Bright Star
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 swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever — or else swoon to death.
