EXTEND – Bright Star

Read the text and complete it with the words given.

Bright Star highlights the ________ between the unchanging stars and human emotions.
The speaker admires the star, yet sees it as completely ________, distant from the lives and feelings of people. It cannot share the ________ of relationships.
Although the speaker wishes he were as ________ as the star, he also longs to remain physically ________ to the person he loves. He compares the ________ of this intimacy to death.

Read the poem, then choose the correct alternative to complete the statements.

1 The speaker wishes that he were ________.
2 The waters are said to ________ the Earth.
3 The speaker would like to remain forever awake beside his loved one ________.
4 If the speaker's final wish is not granted, he'd rather ________.

Read the text taken from an essay by an academic, in which he links the syntax of Bright Star to the opposition between eternity and the passing of time. Decide if the statements are true or false. Then look at the prompts below and write some extra reflections in your exercise book. You can use the final text as revision material for your test.

Bright Star's use of a single, lengthy sentence that runs the length of the sonnet until the final couplet is among its most striking syntactic elements. Echoing the constancy of the 'bright star' itself, this syntactic continuity reflects the speaker's wish for unbroken permanence. Similar to the speaker's desire to stay in a static moment, the structure suspends the reader's emotions and thoughts by delaying grammatical resolution. The poem's cumulative, meditative rhythm is also influenced by the use of parataxis, which is the coordination of clauses without obvious subordination, particularly in the octet. […] Furthermore, the repeated use of the participial phrases 'watching,' 'moving,' 'falling,' and 'ripening' gives the extended sentence a sense of constant motion despite its grammatical stillness. Ironically, the speaker's desire for timelessness is expressed through these -ing forms, which suggest a fluid temporality. As a result, the syntax becomes a tense place that travels through time-bound experience while simultaneously stretching towards the eternal.

Prompts:
1 Refer to section 6.14 in your textbook, and, in particular, the box 'His poetry', to support the idea that Keats moves away from the Romantic centrality of nature.
2 Refer to section 6.14 in your textbook, and, in particular, the box 'His great year' to elaborate on Keats's attempt to make beauty everlasting.
3 Refer back to section 6.14 in your textbook, and, in particular, the box 'His life', to discuss how Keats's health and losses relate to the themes of Bright Star.

Match the rhetorical devices given with the correct lines from the poem (1-4).

1 Bright star, ________
2 Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite ________
3 watching, with eternal lids apart ________
4 soft-fallen mask of snow ________