I have long held poetry at arms length--or maybe truer to say that I held poems at arms length--for I've always felt a poetry of self, and of others, and the world. I never studied poetry, though I've written poems, and someone once wrote a poem for me. It was in this way, among other ways, that I felt a kinship with Fanny Brawne as she's portrayed in Jane Campion's Bright Star. An artist of another medium, whose poetry is of another material, ready to let folds, scraps, patterns of words fall over her as if to be absorbed. Or dissolved, take your pick. Keats teaches her "Poetry enables the soul to accept mystery." How clear, how unmysterious. How wonderfully permissive. Now, I hold onto words seen and heard, their meanings keeping my unknowns company. How lovely that we write to express the mysteries we are starting to understand, read with a yearning to discover them, hear, thinking the answer is there. Bright Star opens on a magnified image of a needle penetrating a piece of cloth, and in an instant, the mysteries of male and female, author and story, artist and clay are offered to us. In her greatest moments of unknowing, Fanny traps butterflies, holds onto Topper, writes, and sews, and reads, and waits for understanding. And as I look around the world--in a kind word from a parent, the silence of someone you miss, the eyes of your cat, the promise of new friendship, a book, a poem, a letter, a scent, a dress only worn before by someone else, a picture of a kiss; "there's a holiness to the affections of the heart" says JK--I'm emboldened to accept that there are no greater mysteries than these.
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