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Fanny flutter meaning1/10/2024 There’s Brawne, reading a missive from Keats in an endless field of bluebells, so overwhelmed by joy that she grabs her little sister, Toots, and plants ferocious kisses all over her forehead. There’s Keats, gangly and tousled, scrambling barefoot up the rough trunk of a blooming apple tree to find a nightingale nest, the prickly bark and branches swaying under his weight until he finds a perch to close his eyes and dream (and get inspiration for one of his masterpieces). The spring love sequences are some of the closest scenes I’ve seen on film to accurately capturing the sensation of being totally blissed out. Natural beauty was one of Keats’ strongest inspirations, and it’s clear that Campion took this to heart. All that makes its flame burn all the brighter, especially against the insanely gorgeous natural backdrop of this movie. Keats and Brawne’s love isn’t almost doomed it’s actually doomed. But this is not a Jane Austen story where somehow everyone manages to get married at the end. Jane Campion’s hallmark is edgy, groundbreaking direction - she made the erotic thriller In the Cut before Bright Star - so a bonneted, empire-waisted costume drama doesn’t seem to promise the exciting filmmaking she is known for. It was during their love affair that Keats had his most prolific and inspired writing period, and it’s this three-year stretch - from meeting Brawne until his death - that is captured in the film. He secretly gave her an engagement ring that she wore until her death, long after Keats had passed away and she married and had a family of her own (swoon!). He fell in love with Fanny Brawne, an accomplished seamstress and nearby neighbor, but because of his financial situation, fragile health, and the general social mores of the Regency era, they couldn’t marry. He was deeply inspired by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, and he wrote odes and ballads like “ Ode to a Nightingale” and “ La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad.” He died young and penniless of tuberculosis at age 25, and his work didn’t become famous until after his death. John Keats was an early 19th-century poet, now famed for being one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language. If you wish there were a way to bottle the fleeting feeling of spring bliss like I do, I urge you to watch Bright Star, the Jane Campion film from 2009 about John Keats and his love, Fanny Brawne, played by Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish. Here in New York, the sidewalks heat up and reanimate the winter’s dormant dog pee, the city smells like garbage, and we have to wait a whole year to feel the ecstasy again. Then, just as you’ve taken a selfie with your spectacular neighborhood cherry blossoms, the petals flutter to the ground, and it’s over. There’s that vertiginous falling-in-love feeling that happens when the first actual not-cold breeze hits your skin. The first signs of flowers and greenery are so gorgeous and well-deserved after winter that a simple walk outside can feel positively giddy. Spring is glorious and terrible, especially in the Northeast United States.
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