Dear John (Keats)

Dear John,

What’s your story,

with the moon?

Last night the moon was as full and round as a baby’s bottom, and I held my thumb out to it like you said, wishing I could feel you there. Instead, all I got was a cramp in my arm, and a strain in my eyes from focusing my thumb over the moon.

And the stinging realization that your metaphor was really just a piece of crap because everybody else would be able to thumb out the moon too. It’s kinda unromantic, you know, to have the whole world share the same moon. It was the only link to our ridiculously short and unrealistic 2-week romance. To think I envisioned it to outlast Iraq. I think I was only in lust with your square jaw and your GI Joe pecs.

You should have known to learn from the real romantic – John Keats. Its amazing how two men who share the same name could be so strikingly different. And a real pity, for modern romance-starved girls such as myself. Nowadays we only have Edward the vampire to go heady with delight. Hardly works, I tell you.

So I’m glad, almost 200 years later, Jane Campion does a feature on John Keats, and his life starting 1818 to its too-early end: Bright Star – A tribute to his best work and an intense yet thoughtful romanticisation of his love relationship with Fanny Brawne.

I’m really not sorry at all to say that Campion did such an honest and tasteful depiction of Keats that I was immediately won over from your stoic, droning narrative. Never mind that Keats is a dead man. His words are still very much more alive than your monotone voice. (And honestly… that thing about coins? Yea, about being minted in the US military? That kinda sucked next to the detailed observations of nature in Bright Star).

It is almost injurious to Bright Star to speak of you alongside it. Everything about it shines in comparison. I think it was the attention to detail. And a strong cast as in Abbie Cornish and Ben Wirshaw, and the very funny Paul Schneider.

The first thing you should pick up, is Ben Wirshaw’s very sensitive voice and the attention it plays to each word when he is voicing poetry. I liked that he played John Keats out to be exactly what I’d expect – a brooding, sensitive romantic with an heightened passion for life, poetry and love. Wirshaw was a very sweet portrait of John Keats, especially in a scene where he explains his then-modern views of poetry, his face a mixture of dreamlike quality and resolute determinedness. Definitely a hero of English poetry. (Dear John, this is the way to express feelings. It is not just about a hard jaw, really.)

I also enjoyed Abbie Cornish as Fanny. She stayed so true to the script, everything about her felt so raw, so real. (I don’t have anything against Amanda Seyfried. It wasn’t her fault that Savannah was kinda a needy slut. Seyfried was great in Mama Mia! But sometimes acting really isn’t just about being pretty and sunshine-y and wide-eyed innocent.) Cornish carried her solo rendition of “Bright Star” so well, it was the perfect end to the movie. At the end, Fanny runs to the outside of her house, trudging fiercely through the snow. She recites “Bright Star”, choking through her tears, pausing at the words which had made her heart sing; a brilliant soliloquy to picture the painful loss in the untimely death of her John Keats, and everybody’s John Keats. I’d watched the whole movie from start to finish, just to see her play this out again. “Bright Star” was that beautifully read by her, I tell you.

The second thing you should pick up, dear John, is Paul Schneider’s comic timing and sense of humour. Schneider as Charles Brown injected the movie with appreciated bouts of humour. Coupled with Cornish’s feisty petulance, Schneider put a lighter side to the movie. I’m not sure whether Charles Brown’s apparent aversion to Fanny is true, but it helped bounce the movie along and gave it appropriate relief against the intense background set by Keats’ passion, and his impending misfortune with TB – this was already set very early on when Keats was shown nursing his near-dying brother, Tom.

But the best bits about Bright Star were the beautiful scenes set in Keats’ favourite imagery – nature: the butterflies, the handsome green trees, and the lavender field. It really seemed that Campion sought to pay tribute to his heightened sensitivity to nature, using it as a vassal against which she painted the love story of Keats and Brawne. Like how Wirshaw tells Cornish that poets have no identity, but only sing of the beauty they find in everything else around them.

And so I couldn’t help that all throughout, while my eyes feasted on images of butterflies resting under the soft glow of spring’s sunlight, or of Fanny in a lavender dress amongst a field of lavenders, reading one of John Keat’s poetic love letters, the first three lines of Endymion kept playing through my mind. I know I’ve just shared them in a previous post. But I’ll have it for you here again. Because it rang so true throughout the movie, and should ring true in everyone. We all should take a little time to let beauty into our lives, in one way or other.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it never passes

Into nothingness…”

So you see, dear John, you have much to learn from the real romantics. Life’s not simply about an obsession with that one girl whose wide-eyed innocence has got you elevating her to a pedestal.

Campion also did well to bring out the burning passion between Keats and Brawne through loving gestures, comforting embrace and appropriate recitals of Keats’ sweetest words. A testament to the fact that love can be shown to be as deep or even more all-consuming in more ways than just nudity and sex. Dear John, the exaltation of love is better achieved between two souls, connected in spirit through a shared passion and longing for the good well-being and sweet affections of the other, than just skin-on-skin proximity. This, I think, Campion managed expertly.

After all, love should really be a celebration of all beauty around you, and a passion for sieving it out, even in the poorest of health, and hardest of circumstances (poor Keats, sob). Only then, I believe, can you truly appreciate the love surrounding you, and be able to elevate it to the miracles heralded in Keats’ natural imagery. Now only that I’d call a love life-changing.