In the eighteenth century, English poets generally stopped writing sonnets. For Wordsworth and the other Romantics, then, writing sonnets became one way of distancing themselves from the eighteenth century. And Keats, who had a special devotion to Shakespeare, seemed to see writing sonnets as a way to become in some ways a more Shakespearean poet--a challenge and a technical exercise, as well as a form within which he could work out his Keatsian themes.
The sonnet begins with an apostrophe--a direct address to the star: "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art." Such a direct address also implies some degree of personification of the star--that is, treating the star as if it has some human attributes. But what attributes? Keats immediately begins to tell us what it is about the star that he doesn't envy:.
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,.
And watching, with eternal lids apart,.
Like nature's patent, 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 . . .
So: he wishes that he were as steadfast as the star, but not "in lone splendor hung aloft the night" forever looking down on the earth. At this point Keats seems to switch to what the isolated, hermit-like star is watching: oceans and snow. Again, though, this brief summary leaves out the way Keats presents these things. We don't see impersonal expanses of ocean. Instead we (and the star) see "the moving waters at their priestlike task/ Of pure abolution round earth's human shores." A priest grants absolution for human sin; the waters, analogously, seem to be cleansing ("ablution") those "human shores." Again, then, Keats has personified and moralized nature: the sea seems to be washing the shores free of some human-related taint. And what of the snow? We usually think of snow as cold, and white; here it also forms a "mask.
