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You’ve seen the bonnet movies. All of them. Right? You fluttered your way through Sense and Sensibility — before you knew Emma Thompson was soft in the head (but you can still love Kate Winslet) — and you pondered and hmmmed your way through Howard’s End, Jane Eyre and even that breathless Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. You’ve done the bonnet movies and then some. Maybe you’ve even seen Mrs. Brown — which is really above and beyond the call of Romantic, Victorian, and generally English duty.

But I promise you this: you’ve never seen anything like Jane Campion’s Bright Star. It is unique. Full stop.

The film is ostensibly about John Keats: his work, his poverty, and his love — not at all in that order. But what it’s really about is poetry, and I didn’t think film could truly capture that. Early on in the film, Keats says that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," and that’s the entire point of Bright Star. It is natural. Is that possible? It’s a movie about Romantic English folk, about Romantic English folk obsessed with poetry, and yet it’s fully natural, organic, and raw.

That’s largely because of Abbie Cornish, who (despite her fondness for the poseur Ryan Phillippe) seems to have sprung from ripe, ready earth. She is honest and pure; not innocent in the least, but instinctive and guileless. And she’ll make you want to be true to yourself, against all odds and all tuberculotic twists of fate. She finds and embraces the center that can and will hold. She yearns, in the best possible way.

(The New York Times calls Cornish "as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be." Amen to that!)

And director Jane Campion is even more visceral than her star. She amplifies the burgeoning spaces in poetic lines, and she pauses on the fullness of the all-too-human. She sees a breeze floating through a casement and sends it up the skirt of an uncertain, hungry young woman. She waits — as long as she must, which is sometimes intolerably long — for a word and a look to land exactly where they are meant to settle and thrive. She shows us love, of words and people and life.

I’ve effused too much already, but I can’t help myself: this is the glory of poetry on film. Few films have conveyed the seductive pull of the written word — An Angel at My Table, The Hours, and Out of Africa come to mind — and even fewer make you want to dedicate your days to a steadfast pursuit of nature and rhyme and rhythm and breath. Who can claim to be like Keats, happy to lend himself to a poem at the expense of everything else — even his own heart?

I wish we all could. So in honor of National Poetry Day UK (I’m off by two days), I had to pen an ode to Bright Star. I intend to study, savor, and emulate it, because it knows how we should shine.