Celestial Variability and Keats's ‘Bright star’

Abstract

Early in his career the astronomer William Herschel argued that the appearance of ‘so many changes among the stars’ – stars materialising out of nowhere and stars gradually vanishing, stars fluctuating in brightness and stars changing position – ‘should cause a strong suspicion that most probably every star in the heaven is more or less in motion’. Given his knowledge of modern astronomy, Keats's plea to be as ‘stedfast’ as the bright star might be considered deliberately retrograde: the aesthetic privileging of an ideal by a sky-gazing lover indifferent to empirical science. This essay argues, on the contrary, that the ‘Bright star’ sonnet seizes upon a figurative paradox produced in a period of epistemological transition. The indeterminacy of the bright star image introduces an affective dimension to the sonnet more in keeping with its Petrarchan roots and captures an essential quality of even steadfast lovers: changeability.