Quick Link: Keats' Words--> Campion's Screenplay

Bright Star - from Keats' words to screenplay (via Enchanted Serenity of Period Films) shows us one perfect example of how carefully Jane Campion used words and images from Keats himself to craft her screenplay for the year's best film. Go check it out!

Interestingly enough, this reminds me of a reverse version of the way Wordsworth used his sister's exactingly detailed journal entries to inform his poetry.

This movie is out on DVD in a few weeks!

Bright Star

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 moving waters at their priestlike task	5
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 steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,	10
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

So as I tweeted, my HLP and I went to see an evening show of Bright Star last Thursday night; with us in the theater, most of the neighborhood's over-60 population and a few other young folks.

Well, the movie lives up to the hype, readers, particularly if you are a poetry fan. Its pace is reminiscent of Brokeback Mountain, slow and deliberate, with a lingering touch and gorgeous use of landscape (and in this case, interiors) as reflection and comment on the emotions running through the film. The acting was phenomenal. Ben Whishaw was a believable Keats--wiry and intense and brilliant but with a sense of humor and also a detachment from the world he writes about, a ghostlike quality that prefigures his soon-to-be fragile condition. It's important to see him as a real person, one who eats and plays and is occasionally petulant and childish despite his genius, while also seeing him as one of the Greats--and Whishaw and Campion do this perfectly.

This otherwordliness of Keats is counterbalanced by his very earthy lady love, Fanny Brawne, played by Abbie Cornish. And yes, she is as good as everyone says. Fanny is not just a typical "spunky" period-drama heroine but also an eccentric, vulnerable, curious young woman. The ruffled collars she makes for herself are both lovely and ridiculous, and so is she. From their first encounters, it's clear that she and "Mr. Keats" share something the rest of the world does not: a deeply passionate outlook on, well, everything. And her relationship with her family, subtly-drawn, is extremely touching. There are glimpses of her mother which reveal why Fanny grew up to be as boldly unique and uncaring about social convention as she was.

Bright Star treats Keats' poetry with respect and refrains from too many winking nudges to its literate viewers. Unlike Becoming Jane, set in the same period, it doesn't posit Fanny as Keats' only muse or the source of his genius or even the source of any of his good lines, which is a wise choice on Campion's part. It does suggest that "Bright Star" was "her" poem, but Fanny is surprised to hear it when Keats recites it to her. It also gently exposes how young and melodramatic its lovers are without mocking them for being that way.

"Bright Star" explores what it takes to love, and lose, a great and doomed artist--yes, we all know how it ends. Bring your hankies, but don't fail to see it--it's one of the great ones.

Bright Star Trailer

and h/t to tweep @kafkatronic for reminding me to post THIS!

Jane Campion's Keats Biopic a Hit In Cannes

The Guardian gives four stars to Jane Campion's latest film, "Bright Star" a period piece exploring mega-genius Romantic poet Keats' doomed--but oh-so-passionate--love affair with his neighbor Fanny in the final years of life. You bet your bonnet I'm going to be seeing this film when it comes stateside.

Keats is one of my absolute favorite poets, although sometimes I find him so brilliant and dense it's overwhelming. On my first trip to London I insisted on a day out on Hampstead Heath, which is as inspiring and poetic as it's cracked up to be, and then a visit to his house, which was surprisingly small and boring, a testament to his vivid imagination. I remember one of my college professors' mourning Keats' early death because he believed the poet would have become a novelist and playwright as well and left us with some unforgettable major works had he lived.

As for Campion, I'm not familiar with her work but I appreciate her feminist sensibilities. I've long been intrigued by her "Portrait of a Lady" because of its cast (Viggo as Caspar Godwood, John Malkovich as Osmond!) and may have to netflix that, stat!

Valentine's Day Sonnet-a-Thon: When I Have Fears, John Keats

When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

--John Keats

Monday Evening Poem, Autumn Edition 2

John Keats, To Autumn

1. SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,	5
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,	10
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
2. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;	15
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;	20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,	25
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;	30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Did Percy Shelley Un-Egalitarianize Frankenstein?

According to a new edition of the book, which breaks down Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's original Manuscript of Frankenstein and separates out the talented but troublesome Percy's corrections and edits, her original draft is actually much more accessible. Via Jacket Copy:

The results are fascinating. We read a more rapidly paced novel that is arranged in different chapters. Above all, we hear Mary’s genuine voice which sounds to us more modern, more immediately colloquial than her husband’s learned, more polished style.

Think of all the eighth graders in the anglophone world, forced to read Frankenstein by their school's curricula, who might wish that Percy had minded his goddamn business when editing his wife's draft!

(No disrespect to Percy, yo. Did you know he advocated Irish independence and distributed pamphlets on birth control in his day? The man was way ahead of his time, he just wrote more floridly than Mary).

Monday Midday Poetry: Ode to the West Wind, Part IV

By Percy "I seduced my [awesome Gothic novelist] wife at the foot of her [amazingly prescient feminst] mother's grave" Bysshe Shelley.

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share



The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be



The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven



As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!



A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

This is my fave stanza of a generally kick-ass long poem. You can probably see why. The language is dramatic ("I Fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" PERCY. TRUE.). The sense of longing is potent. Shelley contrasts the heaviness of his current life with the lightness of childhood, nature and the wind. Also, he uses the phrase "skiey speed." I rest my case.

Monday Morning Poem: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

William Wordsworth...

   I WANDERED lonely as a cloud
       That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
       When all at once I saw a crowd,
       A host, of golden daffodils;
       Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
       Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

       Continuous as the stars that shine
       And twinkle on the milky way,
       They stretched in never-ending line
       Along the margin of a bay:                     10
       Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
       Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

       The waves beside them danced; but they
       Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
       A poet could not but be gay,
       In such a jocund company:
       I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
       What wealth the show to me had brought:

       For oft, when on my couch I lie
       In vacant or in pensive mood,                   20
       They flash upon that inward eye
       Which is the bliss of solitude;
       And then my heart with pleasure fills,
       And dances with the daffodils.
                                           1804.

So starting my new Monday morning poem feature with Wordsowrth seems a little hokey, nmostly because Wordsworth, bless his heart, was so unbelievably maudlin at times. He's far from my favorite poet, and not even my favorite Romantic (Keats and Coleridge claim that spot). But reader, the DAFFODILS are blooming, at least in New York, which is the true harbinger of spring here. And how can one look at daffoldils without thinking of this poem?

Wordsworth's philosophy of nature and poetry means a lot to me , because for this cynic, it's the closest to a guiding principle I have found: savor life's rare moments of beauty and remember them during the more frequent moments of darkness. For whatever reason, we human beings, despicable, lowly creatures that we are, were put on a gorgeous planet. And that random gorgeousness is one of the few things capable of elevating us, if we allow it to "flash" upon our "inward eye." Too bad we're destroying the earth and soon we're going to have to rely pretty heavily on our inward eyes.

But back to William Wordsworth. My favorite line, by far, "is tossing their heads in a sprightly dance." I love the image of the yellow daffodils dancing side by side with the blue bay, sparkling. It's so vivid. And the first line is underrated too--if you unpack the simile, the idea of a solitary human being like a cloud gives you an idea of his utter remoteness.

In short, this poem is like an early Beatles song, almost embarassingly exuberant, but inescapably hooks you none the less ;)

For more sophisticated Wordsworth, see the Prelude and and Tintern Abbey.

And if you have suggestions for other poems to feature on Monday morn, shoot me a line.