Bright Star
By John
Keats
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,
Still, still
to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live
ever—or else swoon to death.