Textual Intervention: Bright Star John Keats

Textual Intervention

Bright Star by John Keats

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 steadfast, 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.

My thoughts are of this poem as I lay in limbo, in this posthumous existence. I saw poor Tom die from this wretched disease; I know it will not be quick!

Light'st treacherous fire in Genius' eye;
And giv'st Ambition strength, — to die!

Whose poison apple did I eat? Whose maiden's flower did I fleece? to earn this consumptive curse; the weariness, the fever and the fret! And though I long to live and fear death, I fear still more this ceaseless pain.

I feel as Dante, lost in the woods – in exile of my will. This is the cruelest ostracisation. If I could, I would choose the hemlock; I would ensure it is my body that fails first; but this disease –this curse– cripples the body to the brink of destruction extinguishing it languidly like a smouldering ruin; and all the while the will is veiled by fatigue, tireless fatigue, which contorts my reason, deprives me of my knowledge, and wisps away my immortality, slowly, as if carried away on some malignant zephyr.

Knowing this, I fall into maudlin moods, drunk on disease and despair. Coughing a vermilion hue from the beast that grows within, I despair! The ascetic life of the eremite, free from my volition, is cruel to my despair.

And now, with the reason that I have left, I look upon the words of Bright Star, more poignant than before. I wrote of moving waters, but knew not how rapidly they would move! What's more no morbid death was less poetic than that which waits for me. I still see Tom:

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

This, my brother's fate, I share; I will not swoon, as a man whom sleep hath felled, but writhe and kick like a horse made lame, until I can bleed no more.

But on that last day when the trumpet sounds, may I take the right road Elysium bound and meet my heroes there. And may I be survived by my words, upon this temporal plane. They will be my bright star, embody all that I am. And if any splendour is to be found let he who finds it know that these were the words of a man:

For I am but a poet, whose name was writ in water.

Post Script

I mustered the strength to write a sonnet this morning. It has failed, as have I, to reach the heights of Olympus. As I lay in bed besieged by death, I allowed myself to imagine a long life. I vicariously dreamt of the lamentations of the infirmity of age, rather than those of youthful disease.

This is my last sonnet:

Sands of Time

Though the light be long and the night complete,

Life wears away as the ocean does shore;

With each passing hour loses more lure.

Crystal, chaste pleasures will never repeat

Limbless and grey – landscape bleak with conceit.

The moon drags back the tide, steady and sure

The aged sand depleted, ever the more –

'Til oblivion and I gently do meet

Rigid and stubborn, man fighting its will

When on a reflection gazes old eyes

Wrinkled and forgotten, never to know

Where, Why and When did the deeper half fill?

Fleeting life lost under permanent skies–

Decaying old bones and sands the winds blow.