Bright Star (Keats) by LiTTLe MACHiNe

Bright Star - 'The Last Sonnet' John Keats (1795 – 1821)

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.

From the album 'Madam Life' by LiTTLe MACHiNe www.little-machine.com
The poem was written in 1820 on Keats’s winter voyage to Rome when he knew he had left England and his beloved for ever. A haunting plea for immortality in the arms of his love, from a man who would die of Consumption at the age of 25 a few months after completing it.