Bright Star (2009)

Abbie Cornish: Fanny Brawne

Photos 

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Quotes 

• Fanny Brawne : I still don't know how to work out a poem.

  John Keats : A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept a mystery.

  Fanny Brawne : I love mystery.

• John Keats : I had such a dream last night. I was floating above the trees with my lips connected to... to those of a beautiful figure, for what seemed like an age. Flowery treetops sprung up beneath us and we, um... rested on them with the lightness of a cloud.

  Fanny Brawne : Who was the figure?

  John Keats : I must have had my eyes closed because I can't remember.

  Fanny Brawne : And yet you remember the treetops.

  John Keats : Not so well as I remember the lips.

  Fanny Brawne : Whose lips? Were they my lips?

• John Keats : Touch has a memory.

  Fanny Brawne : I know it.

• Charles Armitage Brown : If Mr. Keats and myself are strolling in a meadow, lounging on a sofa, or staring into a wall, do not presume we're not working. Doing nothing is the musing of the poet.

  Fanny Brawne : Are these musings what we common people know as thoughts?

  Charles Armitage Brown : Thoughts, yes, but of a weightier nature.

  Fanny Brawne : Sinking thoughts.

  Charles Armitage Brown : Not really, Miss Brawne, musing, making one's mind available to inspiration.

  Fanny Brawne : Mr. Brown? As in amusing?

  Charles Armitage Brown : [fuming] 

  Mrs. Brawne : Mr. Brown, our thought are all very simple so you never need worry about interrupting us. And we should be happy if you would join us for dinner on any day.

• Fanny Brawne : [the night before he leaves]  You know I would do anything.

  John Keats : I have a conscience.

• Fanny Brawne : My stitching has more merit and admirers that your two scribblings put together.

  John Keats : Good bye, minxstress.

  Fanny Brawne : And I can make money from it.

• Charles Armitage Brown : Uh, Mr. Keats is composing and does not want disturbing.

  Fanny Brawne : It's my finding, in the business of disturbing, you're the expert.

  Mrs. Brawne : Fanny, why not speak to one of us you hold in higher favor?

  Fanny Brawne : I'm praising him!

• Fanny Brawne : [refraining from judging John's poetry]  I'm not clever with poetry.

  John Keats : [having sold only one book of poems and to Fanny herself]  Well, neither, it seems, am I. Still, I have some hope for myself.

• [last lines before credits] 

  Fanny Brawne : [speaking Keat's poem Bright Star]  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 masque / 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 swell and fall, / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, / Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever - or else swoon to death.