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When I Have Fears That May Cease to Be
by John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
______________________________
This sonnet by John Keats is written in iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The poem is about Keats’ fears of dying while young. Considering that he eventually died at the age of 25, these fears were not misplaced.
Lines 1 – 4:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
This stanza expresses the Speaker’s worry that he will die before he completes all of the work of writing of which he has inside himself. Keats uses harvesting language throughout the stanza – “gleaned,” “teeming,” and “ripened grain,” viewing his own talent as a fruitful field in need of gathering.
Here, the worry is not so much death, but what death’s early arrival might prevent.
Keats was so certain that he would die unknown, and unremembered, that his epitaph states that his name “was writ in water.” Ironically, though, he is among the English language’s most well-remembered poets.
Lines 5 – 8:
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
In the second stanza, Keats fears that he might stop seeing the natural world. These things – the sky in particular – are his muses and he worries that his early death would cause him not to see these things and thus limit his artistic output (“never live to trace.”)
Lines 9 – 14:
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Traditionally in a sonnet, the “turn” occurs at line 9 and we see something like that happening here. The Speaker shifts his focus and concern from maximizing his own writing ability, and becoming well-known in that regard, onto the love he would miss if he died young. Line 9 begins with “And” indicating that this is a separate, newly named fear.
The couplet upon which the piece ends are an interesting – though somewhat bleak – summation. With those two anxieties in mind, he feels alone. The language he uses, stretching from the end of Line 12 into Line 13, is “then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone.” The image here is of someone existing in a state of limbo between an oceanic abyss of death on one side, and the world ahead where life an love and success might occur. In that limbo, he becomes separate and distant from the desires he worries over. In a sense, it feels as though he has died young, before he has actually died.
