Bright Star, Spring, and Poetry...

Have you seen the movie Bright Star?

I love this movie for many reasons...

One, I am a hopeless romantic. I fall in love with the love story of Fanny Brawne and John Keats, and I cry my heart out for the difficulty of their situation...

Two, I love the words that pervade the movie. I am mesmerized by the interweaving of Keats poems with the story. Oh, the idea of living a life so full of such descriptive and beautiful words... the images it inspires in my mind is just so heady... and the movie just reinforces it.

Three, I dream of having a garden like the house in the film has one day. I dream of having a garden that is magnificent no matter the season... The grounds around the house were awe inspiring for lovers of gardens that follow Gertrude Jekyll's sense of garden design. The scene from the movie that gets all the attention is the one with Fanny reading a letter from Keats in a field of blue bells... as lovely and romantic as this scene is, it is the fleeting scene of the lawn in bloom with daffodils that captures my heart.

{a field of daffodils -- I could not find an image of the scene from the movie}

Oh, to have such a introduction to spring and all the joys it brings... and to have the ability to express my thoughts with such a gathering of words that inspire so many images...

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 fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,