Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art --Not in lone splendour hung aloft the
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen
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.'Lord Houghton records that, after Keats had embarked for Italy he "landed once more in England, on the Dorsetshire coast, after a weary fortnight spent in beating about the Channel; the bright beauty of the day and the scene revived the poet's drooping heart, and the inspiration remained on him for some time even after his return to the ship. It was then that he composed that sonnet of solemn tenderness, 'Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art,' wrote it out in a copy of Shakespeare's Poems he had given to Severn a few days before. I know nothing written afterwards."The copy of Shakespeare's Poetical Works had been given to Keats by John Hamilton Reynolds, and is now in the possession of Sir Charles Dilke [rather was in 125 years ago].
It is a royal 8vo volume "printed for Thomas Wilson,
No. 10,
London-House-yard,
St.
Paul's," in 1806; and this sonnet, of which a fac-simile is here given, is written upon the verso of the fly-title to A Lover's Complaint. It seems fair to assume that the reason of its being so high up on the page is that it thus faces a space of equal size containing no words except a boldly printed heading of Shakespeare's poem,
A Lover's Complaint, as if in that mournful moment Keats desired to appropriate to his last poetic utterance a style and title already immortal. Lord Houghton gives a variant of the last line -- 'Half-passionless, and so swoon on to death.'As there is no trace of this in the Shakespeare, there must have been another manuscript -- perhaps a pencilled draft -- and it is to be presumed that the words 'fall and swell', in line 11 of Lord Houghton's text occurred in that, 'swell and fall', the reading of the Shakespeare, being in that case an error of transcription on Keats's part.
The date of the poem is about the end of September or beginning of October 1820.
It was published in February 1846, with a letter from Severn, in The Union Magazine.' ~ Poetical Works of John Keats, ed.
H.
Buxton Forman,
Crowell publ. 1895.
