Bright Star

On the weekend I took myself off to see an advanced screening of the new Jane Campion film "Bright Star", a tale penned by Campion about the love affair between John Keats & Fanny Brawne. I have to say that this is the best film I have seen in quite some time, finally a period piece that doesn't try too hard, one that you can believe in. Oh, how I can see myself in Fanny Brawne - the shameless romantic, oh how I'm sick of the Jane Austin affair of love only being relinquished once a girls "situation" is assured of - Fanny loved Mr Keats unabashedly. And Abbie Cornish was delightful, I don't care whose husband she stole or any of that tabloid chatter, she is a GREAT actor. The scene in which she takes a key from around her neck to unlock a case for her beloved is perhaps one of the most erotic moments captured on film - I shuddered in my seat.

Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 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.

- KEATS