When I have fears that I may cease to be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high grav'd 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.
I love how Keats thematically divided his sonnet. Lines 1-12 express his twofold fears of death--lines 1-9 comment on how he fears he will not fulfill his writing ambitions (using harvest imagery [gleaned, grav'd, ripen'd grain) to illustrate how he feels his imagination is so full and he has much to offer that will be cut off by death), and lines 9-12 comment on his fear of losing his love. He resolves his fears in lines 13-14, realizing that he is insignificant in the light of the wide world, causing his fears of lost love and fame to sink into nothingness.
ReplyDeleteThe prominence of the long "e" assonance in this poem really stuck out to me. The opening two lines are dominated by it: "fears," "cease," "be," "before," "gleaned," and "teeming." In the middle of the poem, the long "e" assonance backs off to be replaced with long "i" and "a" assonance, but Keats returns to the long "e" assonance at the same time that he returns to the action of feeling in line 9. He feels in the beginning of the poem fear of loss of mind, of emotion, of whatever self is (a problem of the poem - if Keats ceases to be, what ceases?), and he fears in line 9 the loss of love, as Kate said. The last word especially, "sink," sits louder because of the repetition of the long "e" assonance in the previous lines makes the ending that much more emotionally retired and destined.
ReplyDeleteBtw, that is Allison Downing who posted.
ReplyDeleteI was particularly struck by the imagery of space and movement in this poem. It is in the first twelve lines, as the speaker looks up into "night's starr'd face", at the clouds and their "high romance", that he begins to contemplate his own smallness and fear it. It is in view of the greatness of nature and time that he is consumed by the desire to create and to love, and by the fear that he will not fulfill the greatness of these desires before his time runs out. The enjambment, excessive use of dependent clauses, commas emphasize the scattered nature of the speaker's thoughts, while the interlocking rhyme pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet holds the first 12 lines together despite the frenzy of the speaker's mind.
ReplyDeleteWhen the speaker arrives at his final conclusion, standing on "the shore of. the wide world", he becomes concise, stating his thoughts in a couplet. Tragic and blunt as they are, he explains that all these high thoughts and hopes inspired by the sky will fall back to earth. The vastness of nature, the very thing which inspired fear in the speaker, is also that which resigns him to his fate of meaninglessness. The brutality of these conclusions is emphasized by the sinking action, and the repeated rhyme of the couplet, in contrast to the variated rhyme pattern of the previous 12 lines.
The emotional effect of "When I Have Fears" lies in its structure. The turn of the poem occurs on line 12, one line short of what would have been a Shakespearean sonnet: "then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone...". Keats ends on an ironic note, musing that in his anxiety he misses out on love and the true meaning of life. Yet this final turn is really a summation of a list: a series of anxieties that make the turn all the more convincing. "When I have fears... When I behold... When I feel" all preface each of the first three quatrains with engaging emotional verbs. One wonders if Keats is toying with a series of mini-turns in with he views these "fears" in different ways. The mounting fears correspond with that lingering "Nothingness" in the last line of his sonnet. Keats gradually raises the stakes in some sense--all to make the crashing ending that much more powerful.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the format of writing one long sentence in a sonnet is significant; I feel like we're getting one thought that continues through fourteen lines. It has the fluid quality of a stream of consciousness, but it's more organized. We also go through the poem without knowing what his end is.. the structure is "when I _____ ; when I ____ ; and when I ____ until the twelfth line, when we are left with "then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink." This seems a somewhat meager payoff to all his observations earlier in the poem. We're with him as he describes his fears of death, of never getting to experience the phenomena at which he marvels. Then suddenly we are jerked abruptly to the end as his thoughts dissolve into nothingness.
ReplyDeleteThe Norton anthology notes that this sonnet was Keats' "first, and one of his most successful, of his attempts" at utilizing Shakespearean rhyme. It is interesting that he would chose to attempt this famed author's style in a poem that speaks of his anxiety about having an incomplete career, one that may not reach the level of fame which he thinks he deserves.
ReplyDeleteKeats felt a strong foreboding sensation throughout his life, which is part of what prompted his urgency that he wrote about in his poem "Sleep and Poetry": "O for ten years, that I may overwhelm/ Myself in poesy." Keats obviously felt confidence in his intellectual prowess because in this present sonnet one of his chief fears is that he will not have time to "glean [his] teeming brain" of which he compares to a "rich garner full of ripen'd grain." He believed himself to have such keen sensibilities that it would be shameful to let them go to waste were his life to be cut short. I think this sonnet is a wonderful example of Keats impulsive career and the worry that drove him to have such a prolific few years before he did, indeed, die young, and I find it humorous that he would explain these fears while subtly reminding the reader, "See, I am just as good as Shakespeare! Just look at my lines!"