Bright Star

Sometimes, if you're a girl, and it's a rainy Sunday or something, you have to watch an impossibly romantic, tragic, period piece movie. That movie was Bright Star a few months ago. I didn't even watch to the end, something about already knowing the depressing conclusion (spoiler alert: John Keats died young). But the poem sticks with me:

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.

- John Keats, 1819