Last Sonnet

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 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,
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.

~ John Keats

Keats has been my favorite English Romantic poet since I read his “Last Sonnet” in high school. His religious side is consistently neglected—though even a cursory reading of his poems demonstrates that he was a religious thinker from the very beginning of his poetic career. This is most probably because few readers or even critics have been willing to recognize his thinking as such.

I can’t recall when I first read Ronald Sharp’s great study (Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty), but I re-read it from time to time to remind myself of Keats’s “vast idea.” Too little of what is achieved in Religious Studies could be called “vast” (although Marshall Hodgson's three volume opus The Venture of Islam would qualify) and even less of religion as professed and practiced is vast. Keats laid the foundation for a religious revolution while he was composing some of the most compelling Romantic poetry in the English language—and then was dead by 25.