Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is brought to you by John Keats, who, as you know, from a previous episode on this podcast, lived from 1795 to 1821.

He was just 25 when he died. And this poem is a

sonnet with the name written on a blank page in Shakespeare's poems facing a lover's complaint.

And that's facing a lover's complaint. A lover's complaint is in quotation marks. It's a work in

Shakespeare's poems. I'll read it and then I'll give you

some background on it and a few thoughts. Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art.

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night and watching with eternal lids apart. Like nature's

patient, sleepless aramite, the moving

waters at their priest-like 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 steadfast, still unchangeable, pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,

to feel forever its soft fall and swell, awake forever in a sweet unrest.

Still, still to hear her tender taken breath and so live ever, or else swoon to death.

So it's appropriate that this was a poem that was found in Shakespeare's poems because this is

a Shakespearean sonnet.

And one of the things that is customary of a Shakespearean sonnet is the turn after the octave.

It's also called Avolta, the O-L-T-A. And here, after that octave. It's also called a Volta, the O-L-L-T-A. And here, after that octave, we get him starting a line with the word

no, and then a dash. So it's all written as one sentence, even though it doesn't seem like it ought to be.

But the idea clearly shifts. In fact, the way he's using the image, the metaphor seems to shift.

He's saying, I want to be steadfast as a star.

But one of the things that's interesting is that he's saying that the star is watchful,

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