I'd been wanting to see Jane Campion's movie Bright Star, so when I realized this month's Poetry x 12 challenge was to read a poetry collection by a poet featured in a movie, it seemed like the obvious, if not downright lazy choice. All I knew about Bright Star was that it was by Campion, who's made some truly great movies, and that it was a love story about a poet. For some reason I thought it was about W.B. Yeats and Maude Gonne. Of course, in an instant of turning on the movie, I realized these were not Irish Nationalists at the turn of the century. This was Keats and Fanny Brawne. Oh dear.

I've never been a fan of the Romantics. I distinctly missed out on studying with the best English Prof. at my college because he taught Shelly and Byron and Keats. I couldn't stomach it. But that was twenty years ago. Maybe Keats and I could come to better terms via the silver screen.

It is a beautifully filmed movie. And in this case, the beauty of each and every shot, is not just a bit of tasty frosting, but what the movie is about. I can still feel the breeze rolling in through that window, fluttering across her skirt. Aaaaah.

Scrawny, sickly Keats (who could easily have been plucked out of a Portland bar, stripped of his ironic t-shirt and made to memorize the lines) says this to Fanny when she first feigns an interest in poetry: "A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

Good advice in general, and in particular with the Romantics. When I pulled out my giant, tattered copy of Norton's English Literature and flipped through the thin pages to the section on Keats I tried to keep this advice in mind, but still, I failed. I could barely get through a single Ode. It wasn't until I looked up some very oddly animated videos of Keats poetry that I was able to begin luxuriating (with my eyes closed...the videos creeped me out). Without trying to follow the meaning or understand the philosophy I fell into the rhythms of the language, soothed by them like a lullaby. Of course, lullabies are really good at putting me to sleep.

So much for this month's challenge. Now who's going to make that Yeats movie? That I really want to see.