To see a world in a grain of sand

Bright Star was on TV tonight, a beautiful Jane Campion film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne. It makes you swoon at the tortuous romance of it all, the beautiful poems and odes their love gave rise to. One of the loveliest examples is 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.

But actually, what I love more about Keats than the romance and torture of his love poetry, is observational work, in which inspiration is taken from little objects and innocuous trinkets. Poems such as On Receiving A Laurel Crown From Leigh Hunt or On Receiving A Curious Shell, which use observation and daily activity to explore their themes. They find stupendous magic and elaborate tales in the everyday.

That is far more inspiring; the ability to articulate and explore huge themes such as life and death in an immediate way, just from your experience of the things around you. Poems such as On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time:

My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.

Good old Keats. Sentimental maybe. Important definitely.