The sonnet begins with an apostrophe--a direct address to the star: "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art." Such a direct address also implies some degree of personification of the star--that is, treating the star as if it has some human attributes. But what attributes? Keats immediately begins to tell us what it is about the star that he doesn’t envy:

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patent, 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 . . .

So: he wishes that he were as steadfast as the star, but not "in lone splendor hung aloft the nig

No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

In his ninth line, Keats provides what in traditional Italian sonnets was called a "turn"--in this case from what he doesn’t envy to what he does.

Before moving on we might also note that by Keats’s time people no longer used "thou" (or "thee," or "thy") in ordinary speech. Like us, they said "you." So when Keats says "thou," he’s being deliberately archaic--trying to make his language, perhaps, more "poetic" and Elizabethan.

Some topics in this essay:
Wordsworth Romantics, Couldn’t Keats, Keats Nightingale, Reading Pope, Grecian Urn, Bright Star, Pope Keats, Milton Pope, Donne’s Valediction, fair love, writing sonnets, moving waters, bright star, human shores, round earth’s human, swoon death, lone splendor, splendor hung, splendor hung aloft, hung aloft, earth’s human shores, doesn’t envy, moving waters priestlike, hung aloft night,