Someone on the imdb board for Bright Star posted the following snippet of an article. These are Jane Campion's thoughts at visiting Keats's gravesite. My heart was moved by it!
Here is the complete article:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 895812.eceHere is the excerpt posted on the imdb message board:
"My film journey with Keats ended the day we finished shooting in Italy in June, 2008. We re-enacted a version of Keats’s coffin being carried from his lodgings, across the Spanish Steps and into the waiting funeral carriage before clattering along the empty morning streets,on its way to the Protestant cemetery. After we had celebrated the end of our shoot, a few of us made the journey to the cemetery and finally, after all this time, a century or two for Keats and six years for me, I was standing as near to Keats’s mortal remains as I ever could. Cats of all kinds strolled among the graves or along walls. An old tomcat curled his tail around Keats’s gravestone, rubbing his battered head back and forth. Someone had left a tiny souvenir bear with a red T-shirt on the grave and our designer scooped it up, explaining to the bear and to Keats that she would take it to her daughter in Australia. Behind the headstone was a bunch of Cellophane wrapped around rotting flowers.
I knelt and kissed the grave. I felt the sun on my back, the cool of the stone; I remember the bright, waxy new foliage in shadow and speckled sun, and all my many complicated human feelings and thoughts were all together there with me at Keats’s grave.
His poems were my portals into poetry, and his life and letters staged for me a revived creative relationship with myself — as well as faith in the Divine; there is no other explanation for his best poetry. The beautiful human Keats opened himself, he was 'a bright torch, and a casement ope at night, to let the warm love in!' Perhaps I will be 93 and mumbling: 'Darkling I listen; and for many a time/ I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme.'”