Eternal Love Through Death in John Keats Bright Star Essay

Love, being unmatched of the most debated topics in literature, often serves as a source of inspirations for many of writers and poets, including John Keats. Throughout his life, he wrote countless get by songs and letters, addressing his fill inr Fanny Brawne. The fighter, apart from being the symbol of regularness and constancy, it is as healthful a metaphor representing Keats himself. Through Keats idea of Mansion of life, the poem is consisted of dickens floors where the first floor displays his choleric enjoy for Brawne while the second floor prates about his inner desire for end.Keats first expresses his ideal, tho paradoxical love. There are two essential yet conflicting qualities in this poem the verity verses the ideal and the immortal verses the mortal. On one hand, he would like to be like a star, steadfast and unchanging. On the different, he dislikes the solitude of the star as it has to watch the moving waters and the new soft-fallen sham/Of snow fro m afar like a sleepless Eremite. He continues to state that if he has to sleep unitedly perpetually, he would rather pillowd upon my bonnie loves ripening breast. The ideas to be eternal and to love simultaneously do non go hand in hand. To love, one has to be human and in that locationfore not an immortal, steadfast star. In the last line of the poem, Keats acknowledges that he would like to live ever in love, but he has to be human in order to experience love, which hints that the love between Keats and Brawne will not last and will eventually fade a instruction as beat goes by. The other possible alternative to immortalize their love is faint to ending. One of Keats letters from 3 May 1818 to Fanny Brawne echoes the idea of swooning and it says I love you all I can learn you is a swooning admiration of your Beauty.(Poet.org) This can be interpreted that he wants to die while experiencing intense, rapturous love or according to the letter, overwhelmed by her beauty. Whi le I was reading Bright Star, I could not help but catch the similarity between Keats and Shakespeares idea of love. In the opening of Shakespeares sonnet 116,Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it vicissitude finds,Or bends with the remover to removeO no it is an ever-fixed markThat looks on tempests and is never shakenIt is the star to every wandering bark,Whose worths unknown, although his height be taken. (Shakespeare)Shakespeare talks about his ideal love and marriage. Keats, being a reader of Shakespeare, is in some way affected or inspired by him. Shakespeare describes love as an ever-fixed marks that is never shaken even in the wildest storms. Keats transformed Shakespeares ever-fixed into steadfastness.Keats accordingly moves on to talk about a more sexual and sensuous love. With more explicit descriptions of my his fair loves body parts, those descriptions hint the idea of sex and orgasm. He imagines himself pillio wd upon my fair loves ripening breast. The news ripening gives a notion of youth, implicating that the lady is young and energetic. Keats alike describes the rising and falling of her chest when she takes her tender-taken breath. If he could, he would so live ever. However, it is impossible to live forever and the only solution would be swoon to death. Keats did not explicitly manifest the readers what it means to be swoon to death and leave us a lot of room for imaginations. The word swoon and other erotic images of the ladys body parts bring us to the subtext of the poem sex. La petite mort is a French idiom or euphemism for orgasm, meaning little death. According to Oxford Dictionaries, swoon means to enter a state of ecstasy or rapture. Whether he intended to talk about sex at the end of the poem is still indefinable as we have no idea of what Keats was thinking when he wrote the poem. Though Keats did not write any overly sexual poetry, there is always a strong erotic indic ation in many of his works. If the sexual subtext is intended in the poem, I believe that it creates a nice denouement to the poem.Keats obsession with death and his love for Fanny are intertwined seamlessly throughout the poem. In one of his letters, he states I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death (Poet.org). Not only is Keats intimidated by death, to some extent he is also intrigued by it. Even though he is worried about the approaching death, to him the promise of death is comforting and soothing. The only resolution to achieve the paradoxical ideal of being eternal as well as experiencing love is death. Through death, immutability and steadfastness can be achieved. Keats has seen many people died in his lifetime. His father died when he was eight his mother died from tuberculosis when he was 14 his brother Tom died also from tuberculosis when he was 19. Along with his familys deaths, he has also seen a lot of patients died as he was also a medical student. Therefore, constantly seeing people die in a way reminds him of the transience and the mutability of life.There are some religious references in the second quatrain of the poem. All these references, other than conveying the loneliness and the solitude of the star, also illustrate his longing for the promising death. The poem was written in 1819, the same year when Keats contracted with tuberculosis. The word ablution is heavily loaded with connotations, both religion and about death. From the Oxford Dictionary, ablution refers to the washout or cleansing of the body. In Christianity, there are different forms of ablution and one of them is the preparation in the first place the burial of a dead person. Here Keats is hinting that his death is near and the priest will cleans his body after(prenominal) his death with the moving waters. Further Keats also mentions the soft-fallen mask/Of snow in the following two lines. Seasons always act as symbols of di fferent stages of human life in literature. Spring refers to birth or new beginning summer means maturity autumn represents old age while overwinter symbolizes death. In line 7-8, with the mountains and moors covered in snow, such explicit image suggests that death is approaching. Though death is coming, Keats is not browbeaten. Yet, he is fascinated with death as it helps him to accomplish the co-existence of eternity and love.Bright Star is a poem that can be read on many different levels. To me, the poem is not plainly a declaration of his ardent love for Fanny Brawne. It is also an expressive lyric poem addressing his cultism as well as obsession with death. The main themes of the poem are smoothly woven together and this showcases Keats expressiveness and his wit.Works CitedKeats, John. Bright Star. n.d.Oxford Dictionaies. Oxford Dictionaries. .Poet.org. Selected Love Letters to Fanny Brawne by John Keats. 17 October 2013 .