Bright Star: Love Letters And Poems Of John Keats To Fanny Brawne (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
Have you ever written a billet-doux? ; )The lippy, ill and coronary young man, Keats, is the pure example of a champion that gets jealous, loves tenderly in rich sentimentality, and allows his words to be in frequency with his heart. It is amazing how humans joggle the counter parts of loving someone, and earning a living in the extremities of reality. Do you think it is possible to love truly, and live in reality (earning a living)? It is difficult to be in love, and focus on something else. When one falls in love, he/she multiplies in the presence and absence of the other. It is almost like separation, but running towards the finish line just to be close. How can you then be in love, and still be realistic? IT IS queer.Keat's words:You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour- for what is in the world?"Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom... I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd, but three summer days, three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could contain."Now, do you see what is happening? Love invites fantasy. Oh now, you're smiling, because you think these romantic books are closing doors to reality, yes? Well, that too is true, but not if you are in love. When you are in love, your heart is the biggest tale waiting to be told, and whoever said it differently, is hiding in the conditions of the fates of wanting to be intelligent, or something of that derogatorius. Love, is a gift of the heart, which holds closely to us, both reality and fantasy. Be careful to not say what it is.Placing my words beside Keats, I can relate. He mentioned the tiniest details. Do you know what that means? It means that when you are in love, it is literally two souls merging, but at the same time refusing, because reality is so monetary! Love truly. You'll think more, and expand your "horizons".- MY LOVE HAS MADE ME SELFISH. I CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT YOU. (Ha, I bet you smiled, because you thought of your beloved)Send your loved one a few words. Send. You have many. Words.Yours truly and ever blossoming,Taymara Jagmohan. As a poet I found Jane Campion’s movie Bright Star disappointing. The scenery was rich, the relationships uplifting, but the repetitive lines from one poem felt to me like a jingle across this world of beauty.There it is. I have admitted it.Now I pick up the companion volume, as so many movies now have, and read Jane Campion’s introduction. Her feeling and the way she was drawn into Keats’ life and story seem so out of place to what I experienced in the theatre. I consider whether this was really a movie of this time, for those equally detached from good poetry as Jane, that she was able to offer them an opening rather than a full taste of what Keats offered. But then I have always written poetry. I devoured it along with books of myths and legends when I was in primary school. I have long written my own verse before “coming out” in my early twenties when I came across a whole scene of poetry readings and possibilities – especially those that were not bound by universities and their heavy-handed interpretations. I live in Melbourne, Australia, which was made a City of Literature in 2009, around the time of Jane’s movie. It is possible to go to a poetry reading here on almost any night of the week, and back in the 80s when I first entered a poetry café, there were options on at least three nights of the week. So I accept my expectations are higher, different, more informed than most.Then as love stories go, the letters between Keats and his financee Fanny Brown, also touch my own memory of a particularly poignant relationship with a fellow poet who died at a reasonably young age. The feeling that others might have more understanding or common feeling with me through such a movie was an interesting thread to consider.Yet I preferred not to talk with anyone about the movie because the insistence upon the single poem bored into me so indelicately. I could not understand how anyone in the audience could really get much feeling for what Poetry was about from such a presentation.I did listen. It was partly through a friend’s recommendation that I saw the movie to begin. Although artistic, her own relationships have tended to be somewhat chaotic. I did not see this movie soothing her heart. Although she did attend some poetry readings with me after it. Her conversation still too much in the common idiom.Why is my feeling so different than others? I would suggest it has more to do with the live performance, the live reading, the live interaction between storyteller and audience which shapes the story as it goes, and never repeats in the retelling. My love of poetry stems as much from my grandfather’s tales of his camping out through the Depression years as he panned for gold and caught rabbits, as it does from the books I read. It was his voice, his breath, that helped me lift the words off the page and breathe them myself.And every reading was different.I learnt to play with the words, to experiment with breaks and rhythms and pronunciations of foreign ideas. I didn’t have to research every story, the nuance carried through the forms and indications of the poetry itself.As I read this volume of Keats poems, I find it interesting to not have any learned professor explaining settings or references, but just the poems themselves. Jane’s brief introduction gives more to me about her expectation that most of her audience would not know of poetry and wish such an introduction for themselves as she had. Perhaps for beginnings this is enough. As a poet I imagine it is the capturing soul which draws poetry and its understanding toward it. I doubt it can be sold to anyone who does not already have an inkling within themselves.Those who will – will find it.At least Jane Campion has set in place a signpost for those who need assistance.I am undecided whether I will bother with the biography she used herself.
What do You think about Bright Star: Love Letters And Poems Of John Keats To Fanny Brawne (2009)?
Such gorgeous love letters! I enjoyed reading Keat's intimate feelings to his love Fanny Brawne.
—npwxox
Lush, precise, extravagant prose - heartbreaking and beautiful.
—Katie
