Bright Star by John Keats – Critical Appreciation
Q. Write a critical appreciation of John Keats’ poem, Bright Star
Answer: John Keats’ poem, Bright Star, said to be the ‘swan song' of Keats, has been deservedly praised by critics for its high political qualities. According to Phelps, it is one of the four perfect lyrics of the 19th century English poetry. The poem inspires the poet's intense desire to have the constant company of a loved one. His life has become lonely enough. The uncertainty of the love affair with Fanny Brown, the unhealthiness caused by the onset of imbibing disease, and the horror of approaching death plunged the poet's mind into its lowest depths.
The site of the bright evening star shining on the sea, as the poet lands on the coast at the beginning of his voyage of Italy draws from the poet this last utterance of love. His passion comes to him with a renowned order in that beautiful scene. He would be fain, like the star, steadfast and unchangeable in his love, but not have the coldness and loneliness of the star. A longing to lie eternally with his head pillowed on the heaving breast of his beloved and enjoy the thrill of sweet excitement is expressed here in a richly sensuous vein.
The senselessness of touch which marks Keats' poetry in general, finds here a most concentrated expression in the closing lines of the poem. Yet it is a passing phase, for in the last lines, another favorite note which Keats had struck in many other poems- ‘to be in love with easeful death, to cease upon the midnight with no pain, has been struck bringing in a quietness and pathos in the poem. As Sidney Colin has said – “These are the only love verses in which passion is attended to tranquility."
Keats' treatment of Nature here is also very interesting to note. Human life is brought here into close touch with nature interacting on each other. Nature seems to have a lesson for Keats in this present mode of mind. He finds the element of nature permanent and enduring. Nay she is holy and has a purifying effect on the sinful life. Thus the evening start shining steadfastly on all things below feels the poet with a longing to share its brightness and steadfastness but not its loneliness. It is ‘like nature's patient sleepless Eremite’. The moving waters are doing their ‘priest-like task of pure ablution round earth's human shores'. It is the Wordsworthian idea of ‘Nature's holy plan' that Keats shares and expresses in the poem with ‘images of such refreshing and solemn beauty'.
In style, diction and melody, the poem reaches a high watermark of excellence. To quote a critic- “we can say of this sonnet- that it is a poem of complete and flawless perfection of workmanship and that there is nothing to mar its rounded grace of charm and its felicity of loveliness”. This beautiful sonnet was the last word of a poet deserving the title ‘marvelous boy' in a much higher sense than Chatterton.
The sonnet is Petrarchan in thought division, but Shakespearean in rhyme scheme. The critics find it difficult to reconcile the state with the octave (H. W. Garrod, for example) and regard the sestet as a lapse from the majestic serenity of the preceding lines. The poet encloses within its structure the attitudes and experiences that clash and combine. The poet longs for a changeless state like the star; but does not desire the loneliness and aloofness of the star. The focus is shifted from the grand impersonal setting in the octave to the personal context in the sestet. The poet seeks a changeless state and at the same time long’s for ardent sensuous participation in the physical love with his beloved.
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