When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be | Encyclopedia.com

On January 30, 1818, John Keats completed his sonnet "When I Have Fears". From the article:

"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be | Encyclopedia.com
At the end of 1817, Keats, who had just turned 23, entered a period of intense speculation on the nature of poetry. In letters to his brothers and friends we find him searching for the possibility that art—by uniting “Truth” and “Beauty” in a single sublime experience—possesses the power to overcome the world of pain and death, to redeem man’s “doubts” and “uncertainties” through a brief spiritual transcendence. Keats called this concept “Negative Capability.” By identifying completely with an experience—such as that of perceiving an object—the poet goes beyond the rational “meaning” of his own existence, his selfhood dropping away in favor of a greater “Mystery” that is revealed in die art itself. In such a way, the doubts and uncertainties, which are part of the self s existence, might also be overcome. In his letters Keats wrote often about this possibility, but he also struggled with its most obvious limitations: that fear is an integral part of experience, and that even the most intense identification with an object or with nature serves eventually to point out the transience of an experience and of man himself. Thus, the greatest fears—of time, and of death—become revealed through the intense “thinking” that accompanies the act of writing a poem.

“When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” addresses the philosophical problem in three ways. First, Keats expresses the concern that death might prematurely abort his art and with it his longed-for fame. Second, he worries that death might also interrupt his quest to settle the mystery(the “high romance”) of man’s existence. Third, he fears that death will also preclude the possibility of his ever achieving the transcendent experience of “unreflecting love”—that is, the experience of loving without the death-dealing consequences of thought and scrutiny. The final lines attempt to synthesize the problem in a way that only precariously avoids despair. Fear turns to thought, and thought reveals that both “fame” and “love” are doomed in the end to “nothingness.” Yet the final fear, that of the soul’s fate—the “high romance”—remains barely open to resolution.

Author Biography
Born in 1795, Keats, the son of a stablekeeper, was raised in Moorfields, London, and attended the Clarke School in Enfield. The death of his mother in 1810 left Keats and his three younger siblings in the care of a guardian, Richard Abbey. Although Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary, he soon realized that writing was his true talent, and he decided to become a poet. Forced to hide his ambition from Abbey, who would not have sanctioned it, Keats instead entered Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals in London, becoming an apothecary in 1816 and continuing his studies to become a surgeon. When he reached the age of twenty-one, Keats was free of Abbey’s jurisdiction. Supported by his small inheritance, he devoted himself to writing. Keats also began associating with artists and writers, among them Leigh Hunt, who published Keats’s first poems in his journal, the Examiner. But within a few years die poet experienced the first symptoms of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother and brother. He continued writing and reading the great works of literature. He also fell in love with Fanny Brawne, a neighbor’s daughter, though his poor health and financial difficulties made marriage impossible. He published a final work, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, which included his famous odes and the unfinished narrative, Hyperion: A Fragment. Keats travelled to Italy in 1820 in an effort to improve his health but died in Rome the following year at the age of 26.

Poem Text

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d 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.

Poem Summary
Lines 1-4
The central metaphor in the first quatrain is the comparison between writing poetry and harvesting grain. The speaker compares the pen with an implement of harvest(“glean’d my teeming brain”) and books with the buildings(“garners”) where grain is stored. The metaphor expresses the first of the speaker’s three main concerns: that death will cut short his poetic career. Just as a person’s natural life spans youth, adulthood, and old age, so the growing of grain follows the natural progression of the seasons. For the poet to die young, however, precludes his chance of “harvesting” the fruits of his mind, which become “ripen’d” only as the poet ages. These fruits, which are poetic works, grant the poet fame, represented by the “high-piled books” in line 3. The fear of obscurity was one Keats carried to his death only three years after composing “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be”. Though he had no way of knowing his life would indeed be cut short before he achieved the kind of recognition he sought, he echoes this concern in the final line of the sonnet.

Lines 5-8
Some readers believe that the second quatrain continues to discuss the fear that death will cut short the speaker’s poetic career. These readers infer that the “high romance” symbolized by the night clouds is a literary concept, a level of artistic expression the speaker will never “live to trace,” or to realize. But another reading is possible. The night sky as a symbol for the ultimate questions that haunt man dates back to ancient times. The Hebrew Psalmist, for instance, reflects on die stars in Psalm 8(in the King James Bible) and asks himself, “What is man?” While Keats’s use of the word romance” might suggest a literary meaning, die reader must also acknowledge more philosophical implications. The clouds move across die moon and stars, making “shadows” that recall Plato’s analogy of me cave wall. These shadows, cryptic and insubstantial as they are, reveal die greater mystery of the heavens. By living, the poet hopes he can divine the explanation for—die “Truth” of—the universe, and by extension me riddle of his own existence. Whether or not he lives to do so, however, remains at the discretion of “the magic hand of chance,” or fate. If he dies too soon, he knows, he will not be able to solve the mystery of the heavens, to “trace their shadows.” This fear that he will die in ignorance of the soul’s ultimate destiny is one mat goes far beyond the question of poetic fame in the first quatrain. It is also a concept mat remains unsettled by the final two lines of the poem—not dissolving, as do “love” and “fame,” to “nothingness.”

Lines 9-12
The third quatrain speaks of another kind of “high romance,” that of “unreflecting love.” In these lines, the speaker first addresses his beloved in typically romantic terms(“fair creature”), yet the quatrain’s main concern is not the beloved at all. Instead, it is the self. The speaker’s meditation on his beloved leads instantly to his twin fears of time and death. Because of life’s fleetingness, his love is only “of an hour.” Further, the consciousness of time—and of love’s transience—precludes what the speaker suggests is the best kind of love: love devoid of analytical scrutiny and therefore free of the fear of loss and death. This kind of love has a “faery power” (in mythology, fairies are immortal) precisely because it is “unreflecting.” Because the speaker’s nature is to be self-conscious, die opposite of “unreflecting,” he fears he will never experience this kind of love.

Lines 13-14
In the end, the speaker’s recognition that he lacks the qualities of “unreflecting love” leads him to the state of alienation described in the final couplet. Because he is too self-conscious to love, he is forced to “stand alone.” Isolated, he continues to “think.” But thinking is, in this poem, equal to death. As he reflects on time’s inevitable course, two things the speaker holds most valuable in life—“love and fame”—are shown to be insubstantial given the fact of death, and they dissolve into “nothingness.” Thus the speaker stands on “die shore/ of the wide world,” at die edge of what we perceive in life but also close to what might exist beyond. In this state, there is only a hint of solace. While love and fame prove illusory, me “high romance” of the universe discussed in the second quatrain does not “sink” into “nothingness.” It is this mystery, represented by the “huge cloudy symbols” of Line 6, that the speaker comes closest to in die poem, his fear of death leading to the ultimate question of his own existence.

Themes
Meaning of Life
Being faced with the prospect of death, the speaker of this poem lists the things that he believes give life meaning. These are not necessarily the things that have given life meaning in the past. There is no indication of how much time he has devoted to each of them or if he has done anything about them at all up to this point, only mat in theory he is realizing at that very moment that these things are important. The first and most pressing thing that he would miss if he died is the opportunity to get all of the ideas that are floating around in his brain written down on paper, as a sort of backup system for when his brain shuts down and everything in his brain is erased. Keats, the consummate artist, had either enough ego or enough faith in the importance of every individual’s story to realize how important knowing about one man’s life could be to future generations. It is important to note that this is a selfless concern, not an attempt to “live forever through one’s art”: the title alone tells us he is not trying for immortal life. His second concern, indicated by his going back to the rhetorical beginning and starting with “when” again(and by the Shakespearian sonnet format, which starts new subjects in the fifth and ninth lines), is high romance, a concept that has more to do with understanding nature than with people. His wish to “trace” the “huge cloudy symbols” of the world is similar to other people’s desire to know God. Love comes third; in describing the object of his love as “fair creature of an hour,” he narrows his concerns about the meaning of life down from huge abstracts to something that is real and that he would actually miss if he died—the sort of actuality that someone who was less of a romantic dreamer or dedicated artist than Keats might put further up the list.

Love
The key word that this poem uses in talking about love is “unreflecting”: literature often refers to love as a way of getting to know oneself by the way that the other person responds—much like the way a mirror reflects an image. With that one word, Keats rejects the notion of seeing oneself in one’s lover, and he supports the less comforting thought of love as a mystery or “faery power” that works its magic on him for no direct or knowable reason. In one sense, Keats shows considerable confidence if he values a love that will not return to him what he puts into it: many people would worry about the possibility of feeling embarrassed or cheated and of loving and not being loved. This might be confidence, or it might be that he does not care. He shows that he does not value this love very highly by only worrying about it after thoughts of writing and nature are taken care of. Also, his particular concept of art is a matter of reflecting the thoughts in his head by the words he puts on paper. Such a dedicated, passionate artist does not need love to tell him who he is.

It is interesting that this poem makes such a clear distinction between love and romance, a distinction that is almost never made in our society anymore. We have come to merge the two concepts together, moving love up in order of importance to make it a more central part of a person’s life, not just the pleasant, powerful distraction that Keats presents it as. In the poem we can see that there is

Topics for Further Study
In this poem Keats lists things that he would regret having not done if he had died. Write a poem about things you would like to do, or do more fully, before you die. Try to follow the structure and rhyme scheme of Keats.
This poem shows the conflict between living sensibly and living for the moment: logic versus romance. How does the speaker feel about “love and fame”? Do you think his feelings will change as he gets older?
a relationship between love and romance—he makes a point of specifying “high” romance as opposed to low, and both are recognized for magical powers—, but the line between them is clearly drawn.

Doubt and Ambiguity
This poem is about the self-fulfilling prophecy, about how the fear of losing all makes the speaker actually lose all. The form that it is written in, the Shakespearian sonnet, requires the poem to draw some sort of generalization or conclusion at the end. Keats does this: his conclusion lists once more the things he expects death to take him away from, only this time he is distanced from them in life. His worry has wrapped him up in a death-like cocoon of self-involvement. The poem does not say why this speaker fears that he will cease to be. Bio-graphically, we can guess that his brother’s fatal illness probably kept the issue of mortality in the forefront of Keats’s thoughts. But, as poet Robert Browning said later in the nineteenth century while he mocking the idea of mistaking the poet’s life for his message, “What porridge did Keats eat?” As for the speaker of the poem, his concern could be caused by anything. If we knew, we could guess whether the fear expressed in the poem is justified or if the speaker is a hypochondriac, and our ignorance seems to be precisely Keats’ point: doubt is never justified and is always counterproductive. It is of course a reality that every person will “cease to be”; it seems at first to be a good thing that Keats is applying his massive intelligence and sensitivity to this universal situation, but the poem ends on a note of defeat, with the speaker standing alone at the end of the world before death has even made such isolation necessary.

Style
“When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” is considered one of Keats’ most successful attempts to write a Shakespearean sonnet. This fourteen-line form begins with three quatrains, or four-line parts in which the every other line of each part is set in end rhyme. The three quatrains generally introduce and delineate some kind of problem, concern or fear. The Shakespearean sonnet concludes with a rhymed couplet in which the issue raised in the first twelve lines is resolved. Keats’ poem addresses in the first twelve lines three different aspects of the fear that he may “cease to be.” Each quatrain examines a different aspect of that fear: the possibility that his career will be cut short, that he will never solve life’s great mystery, and that he will never experience the most profound love. The three quatrains also open with parallel clauses, each introducing a different verb to reflect a new aspect of the poem ’s meditation on death: “When I have fears” (of dying), “when I behold” (the night sky), and “when I feel” (the fleetingness of love’s possibility). The poem’s resolution really begins midway through Line 12, following the dash. In the final two lines, fear leads to thought, to alienation, and thus to the inevitable sense of “nothingness” that yields mostly despair.

As in most Shakespearean sonnets, the dominant meter is iambic, which means the poem’s lines are constructed in two-syllable segments, called iambs, in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed. As an example of iambic meter, consider the first line of the poem:

When I / have fears / that I / may cease / to be .

Reading the line naturally, notice the emphasis on the stressed syllables. You will notice this meter in most lines of the poem. Sometimes, however, the poet deviates from the iambic rhythm to emphasize important phrases and particularly figurative uses. Some examples of this are “like rich garners” (Line 4), “the night’s starred face” (Line 5), and, most strikingly, “to nothingness do sink” (Line 14)."