To the cinema to see Bright star, Jane Campion’s film about John Keats. I’d loved her earlier film The piano, and Keats is a poet who has remained in my affections for a long time.
The film didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Perhaps I’d hoped for too much from the reviews and publicity. I found the first half slow, the second half better but not quite involving enough. The performances were good, the photography was beautiful, so what was wrong?
The sound let it down. Too many of the conversations were mumbled, and there was a difficulty in speaking (and hearing) the verse. Too often the characters spoke the verse as if they were reciting it to themselves to memorise the lines. “Bright star” was spoken several times but no more than the first couple of lines of this sonnet ‘Written on a blank page in Shakespeare’s poems’.
Keats was important to me. I’d read him as part of my A-levels. As with songs of that period, I seem to remember the words still with relative ease. I couldn’t possibly remember words I read yesterday, but the words of Keats from decades ago remain strong in my memory. No doubt it’s partly because we read the poetry aloud in class, then studied it, wrote about it and were examined on it. That process turns many people off certain writers but for me it created a lifetime love of Keats’ best work. (There is a lot of terrible stuff too but, to give the boy credit, he died at the age of 25.)
I still believe it’s good to listen to poetry – to read it aloud and listen to the rhythm, the music. We do this a lot in writing workshops and I always think it’s essential to the aim of becoming a better writer.
When the film reached its ending (death, of course), the credits rolled as usual. Normally you sit there (or dash for the exit) while music plays over a long list of actors, producers and people with strange-sounding job titles. This time I sat to the end, and so did the whole audience. The list was there as usual but, instead of music, there was the voice of John Keats (Ben Whishaw) reading all eight stanzas of “Ode to a nightingale”. It was beautifully spoken and the most moving part of the film. Here’s the final stanza – go and hear it at a cinema near you.
“Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf,
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – do I wake or sleep?
In his eighties my grandfather, a retired admiral, could still recite The Hunting of The Snark in its entirety. Not exactly Keats I know, but I’m sure my own instinct to be playful with language owes a lot to hearing him reciting that, and other nonsense verse, when I was small.