Analysis Of Bright Star By John Keats

Cascading stream, aloft you carry on
Not giving up, you do not fade away
And though you trouble your host , it’s drawn
In closer, nearer, feeling won’t betray,
It’s that I crave, the promise to endure
And through dense rapids halting is no choice,
Uphill then down, no stake will bring demure
Forget nor cease nay will we lose your voice
But then— it bends; it bends but then returns
Into the depths its end before refrain
Although we don’t suspect its sundry forms,
Adapt and change to grasp with no disdain,
Bends, bends to join in other parts of life,
To add a glimpse of growth and sight of strife. “Bright Star” is a sonnet written by John Keats prior to the summer of 1819. The basic form of a sonnet requires fifteen lines of iambic pentameter. The two varieties of sonnets we learned about this semester, Italian and Shakespearean, differ in their rhyme scheme. Keats’s piece is an example of a Shakespearean sonnet based on the ab/ab/cd/cd/ef/ef/gg rhyme scheme. I have mimicked my poem, “Cascading Stream”, to correspond to the same structure of a Shakespearian sonnet. Both “Bright Star” and “Cascading Stream” consist of 3 quatrains of alternating rhyme ending with a rhyming couplet. The first quatrain of “Bright Star” is “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —/Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night/And watching, with eternal lids apart,/Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite”. The first line (which is line a in the rhyme scheme) ends with art. This rhymes with apart at the end of line 3 (the other a line). In the same manor, the b lines (2 and 4) end with night and Ermite, which also rhyme. The first quatrain of my poem, “Cascading stream, aloft it carries on/Not giving up, it does not fade away/And though it troubles its host, it’s drawn/In closer, nearer, feeling won’t betray,” does the same thing with on of line 1 and drawn of line 3 rhyming and away of line 2 and betray of line 4. The rhyming couplet closing the poem is also found in my imitation with the last two lines reading “Bends, bends to join in other parts of life/To add a glimpse of growth and sight of strife.” The poems begin in similar ways as well; using the poetic literary device of a caesura after the main subject of the poem is announced in the first two words. This intended pause after “Bright star” and “Cascading stream” enhances the indication that the object is being addressed. Another key feature of a Shakespearian sonnet is that it is written in iambic pentameter. The word pentameter indicates that this rhythm consists of five iambs. An iamb is a foot of a unstressed then stressed syllable. An example of the meter in “Bright Star” is line 5, “The moving waters at their priestlike task”. When scanning the poem, it would look like this: ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /
The mov - ing wa- ters at their priest- like task
My imitation also follows this meter. An example in my poem is also line 5, “It’s that I crave the promise to endure.” It is scanned as follows:
˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /
It’s that I crave the pro- mise to en- dure
Rather than keep the poem too structured and repetitive, Keats inserts a spondee at the beginning of line 13 by repeating a word. A spondee is a metrical foot of two stressed syllables. I included the same structural deviation in my poem in the equal position. The structure of the last lines of Keats’ poem reflects ideas presented in earlier lines. The 13th line of “Bright Star” is “still, still to hear her tender-taken breath”. This echoes that of line 9 which is “No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable”. In both cases the word “still” is repeated

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