COUNTRY DANCING Cornish and Whishaw cut a rug in the sunshine.

It’s a lovely irony that the greatest romance of John Keats, one of the great romantic poets, was unconsummated, at least in the traditional sense. Young moony Keats (Whishaw, as lean and just about as sturdy as a willow branch) and seamstress Fanny Brawne (Cornish, delicately conveying Fanny’s attempt to find her place in the world) can flirt, picnic with supervision and write love letters, but they will never “make love” in the modern sense. But in the older sense of the phrase, they make love like crazy, held in the thrall of a doubly doomed love; he’s too poor to marry her, and a certain looming doom seems to hover over him, foreshadowed by the death of his brother from tuberculosis.

Campion retains her eye for the beautiful details and texture, and it’s nice to see a film that understands Empire-era sensibilities (reciting poetry to each other is as naughty as these lovers get, but Campion makes it feel pretty steamy). But Campion fails to find a compelling arc for the film, instead giving us a series of gorgeous moments, each as lovely as a poem, but not fully satisfying as a film.

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