Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology

Mapping Keats’s Progress
A Critical Chronology

☰

References to this poem

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art

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 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.

× Cite this page:

MLA Style: Works Cited

Keats, John. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, by G. Kim Blank. Edition 3.25 , University of Victoria, 29 May 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_bright_star_would_i_were_stedfast.html.

Chicago Style: Note

John Keats, “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.25 , last modified 29th May 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_bright_star_would_i_were_stedfast.html.

Chicago Style: Bibliography

Keats, John. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” Mapping Keats’s Progress: A Critical Chronology, Edition 3.25 , last modified 29th May 2023. https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_bright_star_would_i_were_stedfast.html.