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In pairs, examine the sources provided below.

Extract the information that is relevant to the construction and interpretation of our two prescribed texts.

In your pairs, discuss if your understanding of the texts have changed after reading through the materials? How so? Write down your reflections.

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Find the poetic, film, and visual techniques that are informed by the context discovered in the previous activity.

Look for connections between the texts, consider the ways in which the texts complement and/or oppose each other, what are the texts saying to and about each other?

How do the individual mediums of the texts impact the textual conversation? (ie what can a film do, that poetry cannot, and vice versa).

Share your findings and observations below, this will prompt a class discussion on the conversation between the texts.

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How can the observations of your class mates below be extended?

Add your additional ideas to their posts.

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Considering the contextual information gathered and the textual analysis we have conducted, what do you think are the author's/ director's intentions in creating the texts?

What is the overall purpose of the texts as a whole?

What is the significance of this pairing of texts?

Why are these texts important?

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Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion DNZM (born 30 April 1954) is a New Zealand filmmaker.[1] She is best known for writing and directing the critically acclaimed films The Piano (1993) and The Power of the Dog (2021), for which she has received two Academy Awards (including Best Director for the latter), two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DNZM) in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film.

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Interview from September 2009

Watch 3:33 - 5:40 & 6:23 - 9:31.

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Jane Campion Interview for "Bright Star"

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September 2009 at Cannes Film Festival

Watch 10:30 - 13:55 & 15:05 - 18:45.

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DP/30 @ TIFF: Bright Star, writer/director Jane Campion, actor Ben Whishaw

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Need help getting started on activity 2?

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Need help getting started on activity 2?

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Here is an article that compares Bright Star and Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Note: the language on this webpage is quite informal, this is NOT an example of how you should write in your exam and assessments. It is just a resource to get you thinking about the connections and themes between the texts.

There is also an instructional video on the webpage. However, it is about 15 minutes in length. This would best be viewed after class in your own time.

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Bright Star responds to Keats' poetry, both as a loving homage which reflects similarities and as a critique, which looks at the world from a different point of view.
Bright Star reflects many of the aesthetics of Keats' poetry through its long shots of pastoral scenes, and awe-inspiring natural landscapes.
However, where Keats' poetry is all about trying to understand love and death in terms of the transcendental or spiritual, Campions' film is far more down-to-earth.

Her film emphasises the physical and emotional aspects of love over the metaphysical. Keats grapples with the finite and fleeting nature of life, and he attempts to comprehend it through spiritual and eternal themes.
Campion deals with the same subject matter, but in contrast, she ultimately suggests that life is finite and death is tragic and unbearable.
What are the Texts About?

Grecian Urn

Grecian Urn is a poem of five stanzas which describes in detail an urn from ancient Greece.
Keats uses the urn as a vessel to explore how its images of the physical, fleeting world (young virgins and trees in springtime) can be made eternal.
This acts as an extended metaphor for his fear of death, as he tries to capture and eternally hold that which is fleeting.

Bright Star

Bright Star tells the love story between John Keats and Fanny Brawne from the perspective of Fanny. It follows their meeting, the death of Keats' brother, their love, their separation, their engagement and finally Keats' death.
Keats wrote during the Romantic period, a literary and artistic movement that focused on imagination, the natural world, childhood and idealism.
The movement was in response to the industrial revolution, which saw an increased number of people living in overcrowded cities, polluted with smoke - the Romanticists advocated for a revival of the natural world to combat this dismal environment.
The Romanticists were also responding the Neo-classical movements in literature, science and architecture which valued simplicity, symmetry, order and reason. In contrast, the Romanticists values the wild, untamed elements of art and human nature.
Bright Star

Bright Star is influenced by the real life context of the Romanticists and the life and death of John Keats.

Its treatment of this subject matter is influenced by a growth in realism in cinema, which aims to give an authentic portrayal of life (rather than an idealistic one, like the Romantics aimed to give).
Furthermore, the film is influenced by the feminism of the 20th and 21st centuries, which focuses on making women realistic and multidimensional, essentially real people. This again contrasts with the idealistic and sometimes one-dimensional lens through which women were often viewed in the Romantic period.
Here are a few themes that you may choose to work with in your analysis:

The contrast between the physical and metaphysical elements of love.

The contrast between the finality of death, and its spiritual elements.

The question of what genuine wisdom is.

The idealised woman in contrast to the authentic and multifaceted woman.

Now we know what we're looking for, how do we conduct an analysis?

The Analysis:

When doing our analysis, we need to have a technique example and effect.

You can do this in what we call a TEE Table.

What's a TEE table?

The TEE in TEE table stands for Technique, Example and Effect. They're a great tool you can use to analyse your text.

All you have to do is include your pieces of evidence under 'example' then identify the technique in the 'technique' column and carry out your analysis.

For more info on what a TEE table is and how to use one to boost your analysis of an HSC text, check out this article here!

There are also two key rules to follow

Rule #1: Make sure that we're linking our technique to our idea. Don't just present an irrelevant technique because it's in your example. Make sure it's relevant to the overall idea you're talking about

Rule #2: The second rule is, make sure you're actually saying something meaningful about your idea. Students have a tendency to just label what their idea is at the end of their point. So, we want to make sure that when we're analysing, each point is saying something new and something meaningful about the idea.

Step 1: Choose your examples
For our analysis, we're going to look at Keats 'The Grecian Urn' poem and compare it with the relationship between Keats and Fanny in 'Bright Star'.
We're going to be looking at how Keats' idealistic poetry grapples with the conflict between the transient and eternal, whereas Campion's realist film makes a purely physical examination of love and death.

The Grecian Urn

The Grecian Urn is actually filled with quotes all the way through so for our example we can just use the first line of the poem:

Example: "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness."

This is referring to an image of a woman on the Grecian Urn that Keats is describing.
He's describing how the urn has her stuck in a moment of her life, but we've also got these connotations of the eternal nature of this woman through the words 'still' and 'quietness'.
She's engraved on an urn, she's eternal, she's stuck there. Standing still forever.

In contrast, he also uses the word 'unravished'. The word ravished sort of brings in these sexual connotations of love, sexuality and virginity. These are seen as things that are inherently very transient.
In the case of the urn, however, the woman's state as 'unravished' is captured for all time.
I think it's interesting because, if we really look at it, we've got a juxtaposition between the impermanent state of being unravished and the stillness and quietness of the eternal woman painted on the urn.

So what does this actually tell us? What's the effect?

Keats is trying to reveal the constant struggle between something eternal and transient.
Through this juxtaposition, he is attempting to say: "maybe we can capture these transient moments for eternity?"
While some things are so fleeting, they may be perpetuated for long into the future in other forms, such as art on an urn.

While Keats focuses on the physical and temporal aspects of love and death. Campion the director of 'Bright Star' is using more of a psychological realist way to explore those ideas.
They come to different conclusions in regard to the relationship between transience and permanence, and this can be contrasted within your analysis.
In Bright Star, we've got a recurring motif of a butterfly that occurs throughout.

So, think about, what is a butterfly? A butterfly grows from a caterpillar, which is a kind of ugly bug, and then it dies quickly. A butterfly is really a symbol of transience.
It's also a symbol of beauty that we might want to hold onto and capture and unfortunately can't.
In 'Bright Star', the character Fanny owns a butterfly farm. and she's constantly trying to catch them.

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How to Analyse Keats Poems and Bright Star for HSC English

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Bright Star responds to Keats' poetry, both as a loving homage which reflects similarities and as a critique, which looks at the world from a different point of view. Bright Star reflects many of the aesthetics of Keats' poetry through its long shots of pastoral scenes, and awe-inspiring natural landscapes.