Playing with Poetry: Creative Writing and Poetics
The University of Newcastle Australia
Now it’s your turn to write a terminals poem.
By retaining only the last word/s of this poem by John Keats, compose your own poem to express your own message, mood or imagery.
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art
BY JOHN KEATS
Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 priestlike 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 stedfast, 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.
Ideal love … no longer steadfast or more free!
by Steve Bamlett
Ideal love … no longer steadfast or more free!
by Steve Bamlett
You seem to me just false, and fading art—
To be less open then you were that night
We saw the same truth, though our eyes apart,
Were wishing we’d become one Eremite
Praying in her cave to solve the sad task
Of understanding how, alien shores,
Might make that lover’s face an uknown mask.
It was a picture we saw where, upon moors—
A lover sees trust, once felt unchangeable,
Fall like my love into another’s breast.
My breast like this man’s would as fully swell,
If you, belov’d man, had not felt unrest,
About our love that once still’d our hot breath,
But – had not so still’d it, that it felt like death.
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