John Keats openly admitted admiration for Shakespeare and recognized the Bard's influence in his poetry. Literary critics of Keats's time (who hated Keats, to their discredit), were kinda over Shakespeare, and they didn't like how Keats emulated that style. This merely provides more evidence that the critics of Keats's time were quite silly. So, it's no surprise that there are similarities between Keats's Bright Star and Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. I stumbled upon this correllary on this fellow's blog (click on highlighted words to go to link). In case you're curious, below are these two sonnets back to back. I love both of them. I savor every word. Such fine poetry!
Bright Star
Bright star, would I were stedfast 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 stedfast, 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.
SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.