When I have fears that I may cease to be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Lyric Poem, written in the form of a Shakespearean Sonnet.

Not published by Keats

·         Originally enclosed in a letter to John Hemilton Reynolds- Keats’s Close friend

·         Poem shows keats’s description of success and love but also shows his understanding that he will die before he achieves either of the two- this results in the sadness/melancholy tone that runs throughout the poem. (Keats was suffering from TB).

·         This poem was written in 1818- time when keats’s brother Tom was dying of TB

·         The centrality of the poem is the focus that Keats brings in on dying young -> he fears that his wishes will not be fulfilled as a writer (line 1-8) and his fear of losing his loved ones/ not having anyone to love (line 9-12)

Themes:

The poem’s themes echo those found in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Keats’ fear that death will rob him of success and fame as a poet – as well as denying him the opportunity to enter into a full and loving relationship - is similar to the concerns of Sonnet 64 (‘When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d’) and Sonnet 60 (‘Like as the waves makes towards the pebbled shore’).

Like Shakespeare, the poem’s writer seems not only to fear the ravages of time and inevitability of death, but also feels anxiety about his poetic achievement and reputation.

The poem falls in 2 thought groups:

1)      Keats expresses his fear of dying from lines 1-12

2)      Keats resolves his fear by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet

1^st quatrain: expresses how fertile his imagination is and his love to express this is the reason for the imagery of harvest.

·         There is an imagery throughout the quatrain of harvesting. E.G. “glean’d”, “garners”( storerooms for grains) ,”full-ripened grain;” -> alliteration of ‘g’ is repeated, reinforces this imagery, as an earthly fell is given in the lining of the vocabularies.  Harvest is a time of fulfilment- cultivation produces valued outcome. 

·         ‘teeming’ – plentiful, overflowing or produced in large quantities.

·         Gleaning- collecting left over crops from field that have already been harvested.

·         Metaphor of harvest contains a paradox, Keats is like the grain field (ready to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry)

·          Abundance is also apparent in the adjectives "high-piled" and "rich."

·         Like the soil in which crops are planted, the human brain produces a rich harvest to be ‘gleaned’ by the poet’s pen and stored for posterity on the printed pages of books. The choice of images from the world of nature further suggests that the process is an essential part of Keats’ being. Creativity for him is inevitable and lies beyond his conscious control.

2^nd Quatrain: he ses the world as full of material he could transform into poetry with his ‘magical hand’ , The second quatrain has language which is more abstract as he contemplates the beauty of the stars: ‘symbols’, ‘romance’, ‘shadows’, ‘magic’, ‘chance’

·         ‘Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance’- Keats finds inspiration in the world in into darkness. His most ambitions, visions and imaginations come to him in the quietest moments of reflection.  The sibilance that runs across this line shows the calmness that keats experiences in his time of reflection by nature. Nature almost soothes him his fears.

·         ‘night’s starr’d face’ – personification of night, Also juxtaposition of darkness and light.

·         ‘There Shadows, with the magic hand of chance’- caesura in the middle of the line

·         ‘To trace| Their shadows’- shadows represent something that keeps moving-> referred ti life cycle. Life keeps moving, it is not infinite.  Keats has only little time to ‘trace their shadows’ that will fulfil his life goals.

The third quatrain focuses on feminine beauty and human love and the sorrow of loss. Notice the poignant effect of the stressed ‘f’s in ‘feel, fair’, ‘faery’ and ‘unreflecting’ and the repetition of ‘never’ in lines 10 and 11 (the latter gaining emphasis by being an inverted foot.

·         ‘Unreflecting love’-> the fact that there is no reflection in his love implies the purity in its nature. this is like love at first sight, it is abrupt and spontaneous.

·         ‘Faery power’- creatures of gentle beauty

(In the Romantic and Renaissance period, faeries were fairly common – mostly due to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.) (Faeries also appear in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was Keats’s favourite play. He held Shakespeare as his presider) William Blake, Keats’s older contemporary, painted the scene from Shakespeare

 Faries are a Romantic idea- even in this painting they are light against the darkness of the background suggesting that they are innocuous and beautiful. They have the power to light up the painting.

The final couplet’s desolation is enhanced by all the long vowel sounds in ‘wide world … alone’ and the clipped endings of ‘think’ and ‘sink’. The poem ends rather abruptly and he almost ends up not caring of the love or fame that he craves at the start of the poem.

Structure

·         This sonnet shows the extent of Shakespeare’s influence on Keats. It adopts the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet (abab cdcd ef ef gg).

 Each quatrain is heralded by a ‘when’, building an anticipation in the reader which is addressed by the final resolution signalled by ‘then’. The first quatrain focuses on concrete ideas of creative harvest; the second on intangible metaphors for passion; the third relates the intangible with a concrete object, though the speaker’s feelings are still unrealised. The final idea starts in the middle of line 12 as the poet sets the personal against the immensity of the wide world.

Most of the lines are end-stopped, the ends of lines coinciding with grammatical pauses. However, the [enjambment between l.1/2 indicates the urgency of the speaker’s feelings, whilst the same technique in l. 7/8 and 11/12 conveys the speaker’s desire to live out his dreams and experience realised human love (as well as write creatively about it).

 Although iambic pentameter predominates, Keats draws our attention to the fecundity of his mind with two spondees in l.4: ‘rich garners’ ‘full-ripened’ and then to the arresting impact of the darkened sky with a triple stress – ‘night’s starr’d face’, followed by a spondee, ‘Huge cloudy’. Twice he focuses the reader’s thoughts by having two stresses either side of a caesura – ‘feel, fair’ (l.9) and ‘love; - then’ (l.12). By contrast, although one would expect to have an [iamb3], there is naturally no additional stress in the word ‘nothingness’ in l. 14, conveying the ‘sinking away’ of significance.