r Fanny Brawne. Keats had met her in December, 1818, but he was having trouble fully committing to their relationship. He wrote several lettters to Fanny during his stay on the Isle, and one in particular seems to give insight into, "Bright Star! Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art". In the letter, he writes, "I have two lucuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both int he same minute." Kets's biographer Aileen Ward writes that while composing the letter, Keats witnessed the planet Venus rising outside his window. At that moment, Ward says, "doubt and distraction left him; it was only beauty, Fanny's and the star's, that mattered"
             "Bright Star!" considers a similar moment, and the sonnet is considered on of Keats's loveliest and most paradoxical. The speaker of the poem wishes he were as eternal as a star that keeps watch like a sleepless, solitary, and religious hermit over the "moving waters" and the "soft-fallen mask/ Of snow." But while he longs for this unchanging state, he does no wish to exist by himself, in "lone splendor." Rather, he longs to be "Awake for ever" and "Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast." Unfortunately, these two desires - to experience love and to be eternal - do not go together. To love, he must be human, and therefore not an unchanging thing like the star. The speaker seems to reveal an awareness of this in the final line of the poem. He wishes to "live ever" in love, but to be in love means that the speaker and the love he feels for the woman will change and eventually die. The only other possibility he can imagine is to "swoon to death." This can be interpreted to mean that he wishes to die at a moment hen he is experiencing the ecstacy of love. Despite the awareness that the speaker seems to express about the paradox of having love and immortality, the poem as a whole can also be seen as the speaker's plea...