Some of my expert interpreting
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Bright star! would I were steadfast 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 steadfast, 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.
Okay, so I got the jist of this poem to mean that human life is not eternal as that of a star. I though it was interesting how the first person pronoun “I” is used onely once in the poem and then it drifts off to personify a star with “eternal lids’ (eyelids??) watching the night. This poem ends up being romantic-just as the snow falls softly, feeling the rise and fall of one’s breast can be an experience so powerful that one feels like he/she can “live [for]ever”.
Unlike the eternal stars, life is fleeting. Thus Keats notes that the snow upon the mountains and moors will still exist after we’re gone. Natural lives on. The poem ends with a comforting image of slow breathing in the sweet and “soft fall and swell” of the lungs on a lovers’ breast. It’s almost as good of a sensation as swooning to death in pleasure.
Also notable is the rebirth imagery in the washing over of the human shores..almost like a new beginning. It is portrayed in the same way that the “new soft fallen mask /Of snow” blankets a mountaintop. The cycle of life is about death and rebirth, clearly present in this poem.
I like your reading of birth imagery in the poem. There’s something permanent–immortal–in the breath of the poet’s lover. Breath…mother allusion…hmmm. Immaculate?
I also think you might want to play a bit more with that notion of swooning: the perpetual state of unrest, excitement…
Have a nice day !