Love Letters: Keats & Brawne

It's February and love certainly seems to be in the air. I'm conveniently reading Romantic poets in an English course, snow flakes are fair and frosty on lashes, and coffee shops are playing affectionate tunes. So, dear readers, I invite you to read some of the sweetest love letters ever penned. The lovely John Keats (one of my favorite poets) wrote the most heartbreakingly beautiful letters to his "sweet girl," "fair Star," Fanny Brawne. One of my favorite passages:

I am almost astonished that any absent one should have that luxurious power over my senses which I feel. Even when I am not thinking of you I receive your influence and a tender nature stealing upon me. All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights have I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me.

 More of the letters can be found here. Read them and your heart will glow, your eyes will sparkle. I am now inclined to read this poem and re-watch the delicate romance film based on John Keats and Fanny Brawne's romance, Bright Star. Swoon.

Photo still of Bright Star film via

To the Nightingale

As summer evenings start to wrap around us in dreamy sunsets and quiet buzzing, hear is one of my favorite poems. It is one I always think of when summer roles around, and I always turn to it whenever I need to think of something beautiful. I also love "Ode to a Nightingale" by the beloved Keats, but this is so gorgeous, and Borges is awesome.

Out of what secret English summer evening
or night on the incalculable Rhine,
lost among all the nights of my long night,
could it have come to my unknowing ear,
your song, encrusted with mythology,
nightingale of Virgil and the Persians?
Perhaps I never heard you, but my life
is bound up with your life, inseparably.
They symbol for you was a wandering spirit
in a book of enigmas. The poet, El Marino,
nicknamed you the "siren of the forest";
you sing throughout the night of Juliet
and through the intricate pages of the Latin
and from his pinewoods, Heine, that other
nightingale of Germany and Judea,
called you mockingbird, firebird, bird of mourning,
Keats hear your song for everyone, forever.
There is not one among the simmering names
people have given you across the earth
that does not seek to match your own music,
nightingale of the dark. The Muslim dreamed you
in the delirium of ecstasy,
his breast pierced by the thorn of the sung rose
you redden with your blood. Assiduously
in the black evening I contrive this poem,
nightingale of the sands and all the seas,
that in exultation, memory, and fable,
you burn with love and die in liquid song.

                     Jorge Luis Borges (Translated by Alastair Reid)

Photo by Nick Athanas

Bright Star

Halfway through the week can feel really arduous. Wednesdays are taxing and anything but beautiful, what with our haphazard calendars as we wearily roll out of bed. So on one of the most difficult days of the week, we should reward ourselves with lovely words.

"Bright Star" is one of those poems that I can always turn to and it still sparkles. Maybe a different way, but it's always special, no matter how many times I've read it.

Bright Star
by John Keats

Bright star! would I were steadfast 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 steadfast, 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.

P.S. Have you seen Bright Star the movie? It's heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

Photo via