'Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art"

When was ‘Bright Star!” written?

September 1819 → published in 1820

Form of ‘Bright Star!’

Shakespearean sonnet → 3 quatrains + a rhyming couplet

Uses 1st quatrain to…

Initial argument (later to be countered): his yearning for a starlike and Shakespearean solitude

homostrophic 1st quatrain, apart from the spondee

“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art”

Immediate apostrophe → sonic link between the speaker and the stars"

star → link to Romeo and Juliet, whose fate is “hanging in the stars”

Shakespearean allusion matches the Shakespearean sonnet

ironic!! stars are not steadfast…

spondee + trochee immediately = foreshadows a later counterargument → “Steadfast” = trochaic foot

“with eternal lids apart” analysis:

optical imagery → star as a guardian angel

Julius Caesar → Act 3, Scene 1 → “But I am constant as the northern star, of whose true fix’d and resting quality there is no fellow firmament”

matches the permanence that the speaker desires

“Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night”

“lone splendour” = juxtaposes the idea of beauty with solitude

“Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite”

a hermit → isolation → or an anchorite (religious recluse)

“sleepless” = fatigue to the consistency of the stars?

“moving waters at their priestlike task / of pure ablution round earth’s human shores”

juxtaposition → image with the rest of the quatrain + first half

gentle transition between static ideas + unrest

Trochee = “priestlike” = metrical hiccup anticipates the later dissent of the poem → metrical hiccup = speaker wants to be constant, but not quite there yet!

enjambment = could represent the relentlessness of the work?

ablution = sacred and ritualistic washing?! stars constantly shining down on the earth?

“moving waters” = mythic power! Poseidon who?!

cleansing human impurities?

“Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask”

mask = purity? idea that the star is so far away from the Earth, that it can’t see the ‘hidden face’ behind the mask of snow?

“gazing” → passivity + angelic features to the star?

fricatives add a gentleness to the discussion of the star..?!

extended metaphor

the speaker wants to be as constant and reliable as the star, but he wants to be surrounded by loved ones too → specifically, his one love?

“Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —”

“snow” = symbol of purity → but snow = temporary!! wants to be as constant as the star, not as impermanent as the now

This is where the change in mood should be → this change in mood is on line 9 → similar to a Petrarchan sonnet, even though this is strictly Shakespearean

dash = pre-emptive volta

“mountains and moors” = huge expanse, sheer scale of stability

“No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, / Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,”

“no —” disruption to the stability → solidifies a Petrarchan train of thought

speaker changes their mind

“still steadfast, still unchangeable” → anaphoric asyndeton of “still” enacts the stillness that the speaker desires

but then this stoic repetitiveness escalates to become sensuous appreciation of “fair love’s ripening breast”

stasis completely abandoned → ripening, maturation, and development

“To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.”

half-rhyme with “unchangeable” → can’t even have a sonic steadfastness!

“fell for ever” its “movement” → stasis completely undermined

sensual sibilance

“fall” → Rousseau?!

kinetic imagery

“Awake for ever in sweet unrest”

2 meanings

1. recognises how purgatorial stasis would be

2. finds the purgatory of waiting for his lover hard enough anyway → definitely couldn’t handle eternity

“sweet unrest” = oxymoronic!!

“Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath”

“still, still” → anaphoric epizeuxis → enacts stasis of movement imagery → tender-taken breathlessness, undercutting the ‘still still’

hear her → aspirate alliteration → sensuality + breathlessness again!!

“And so live for ever — or else swoon to death”

caesura → enacts stasis, abrupt change?

a silence in which readers are forced to dwell on this metaphorical tug-of-war

“swoon to death”

ironic → false image of security, using a Shakespearean rhyming couplet to mask the Petrarchan dissent on mortality

‘Bright Star’ as a twist on Shakespearean tradition

stars = traditionally used to represent unchanging things → e.g. fate in Romeo and Juliet, and as an anchor → guiding people back home → e.g. Odysseus uses the Bear and Orion constellations

here, the star represents changeability!

similar metaphysical ponderings as…

John Donne (1571 - 1631)

“The Flea”, “The Canonization”, or “The Ecstasy”