Thursday, October 26, 2017

How is a conversation shaped between John Keats poems and Jane Campion’s film The Bright Star?

In Jane Campion’s film Bright Star, John Keats’s poems are woven intricately into the story of the relationship between Keats and his great love, Fanny Brawne. The movie begins when Keats comes to stay with a neighbor of Brawne’s in the English countryside. After Fanny reads Keats’s long poem Endymion, she begins their first substantive conversation by quoting some of its lines back to him. She tells him she wished to love it, but she couldn’t—although she thought its beginning “something very perfect.”
Their relationship grows deeper as Fanny offers sympathy for Keats’s dying brother, Tom. At Christmas, Keats comes to Fanny’s house at her invitation, and at dinner her family begs him to recite a poem. He begins reciting a sonnet, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” but loses track of the words when he looks at Fanny, as they both become aware how much they have come to care about each other.
Fanny begins coming to Keats for lessons in how to read and understand poetry, much to the dismay of Keats’s friend and fellow poet, Charles Brown, who thinks she is distracting Keats from their work. As Keats and Fanny fall in love, he writes some of his most famous poems, many of which are quoted in the movie. Brown praises Eve of St. Agnes as extraordinary, and perfect, and quotes lines back to Keats from memory—even as he warns Keats about his relationship with Fanny.
Knowing he doesn’t have the money to support Fanny, Keats tries to stay away, even as her mother warns her against continuing the relationship given his lack of prospects. But he returns from London to see her, and their reunion (in the film) inspires him to write the famous sonnet beginning “Bright star, would I as stedfast as thou art.”
Soon after this, Keats becomes seriously ill (like his brother, he suffers from tuberculosis) and Fanny nurses him, as he works on his new book of poems. She thinks it will be his best, and quotes back to him lines from the ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
For his health, it is decided Keats must travel to Italy. Telling Fanny she cannot go with him, that they must cut ties between them for her own good, Keats quotes lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” one of his most famous poems. After Keats dies in Italy, the film ends with a scene of Fanny walking the snowy countryside, reciting lines from “Bright Star,” the poem directly inspired by her.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats

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