John Keats

Bright Star

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 masque
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—

  1. Works

  2. To Autumn
  3. Bright Star
  4. Chapman's Homer
  5. Endymion
  6. The Eve of St. Agnes
  7. The Eve of St. Mark
  8. Ode to a Nightingale
  9. Isabella
  10. Lamia
  11. La Belle Dame Sans Merci
  12. Ode on a Grecian Urn
  13. Ode on Indolence
  14. Ode on Melancholy
  15. Ode to Psyche
  16. O Solitude!
  17. Keats's Last Letter