When i have fears
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Keats expresses fears in this sonnet that (1) he may die before fully expressing his poetic talents in writing, (2) he may never complete an ambitious romantic work he envisions, and (3) he may lose the ability to experience passionate love.
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When i have fears
- 1. WHEN I HAVE FEARS John Keats
- 2. JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) - Lyric poet known for its vivid imagery - Contemporaries: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley - Romanticist - Greatest works: "I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill", "Sleep and Poetry", and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
- 3. VOCABULARY WORDS When I have fears that I may cease to be Cease: to come or to bring to an end Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Gleaned (Line 2): collected patiently or picked out laboriously. Teeming (Line 2): plentiful, overflowing, or produced in large quantities. Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Charactery (Line 3): printing or handwriting.
- 4. VOCABULARY WORDS Hold like rich garners Garners (Line 4.): granaries or storehouses for grain. Jennifer Garner (spouse: Ben Affleck), Elektra
- 5. VOCABULARY WORDS Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; Garners (Line 4.): granaries or storehouses for grain.
- 6. VOCABULARY WORDS Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance High romance (Line 6): high - of an elevated or exalted character or quality; romance - medieval narrative of chivalry, also an idealistic fiction which tends not to be realistic. Never have relish in the fairy power Relish (Line 11): keen enjoyment or delight in something
- 7. WHEN I HAVE FEARS Type of Poem: lyric poem Type of Lyric Poem: sonnet Type of Sonnet: Shakespearean or elizabethan Rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg Division: three quatrains and a concluding couplet
- 8. WHEN I HAVE FEARS 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 fairy 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.
- 9. 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;
- 10. 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;
- 11. And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the fairy power Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
- 12. Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
- 13. SUMMARY Keats’ feelings of fear: (1) that he may die before he has written the volumes of poetry that he is convinced he is capable of writing, (2) (2) that he may never write a long metrical romance, fragments of which float through his mind, and; (3) that he may never again see a certain woman and so never experience the raptures of passionate love — then he feels that he is alone in the world and that love and fame are worthless.
Editor's Notes
- John Keats (1795 - 1821) was an English lyric poet whose work became widely celebrated for its vivid imagery. His literary legacy is a remarkable achievement considering his abruptly short life of only 25 years. Born31 October 1795 Moorgate, London, EnglandDied23 February 1821(aged 25) Rome, Papal StatesOccupationPoetAlma materKing's College LondonLiterary movementRomanticism John Keats (/ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death aged 25 in the year 1821.[1] Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death, and by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats's work was the most significant literary experience of his life.[2] The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature. Some of the greatest works of Keats are "I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill", "Sleep and Poetry", and the famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
- He wrote the poem “When I Have Fears” in 1818 which expresses concerns that run through his poetry (and letters) such as fame, love, and time. Keats was conscious of needing time to write his poetry. By age twenty-four, he had essentially stopped writing because of ill health. There were times he felt confident that his poetry would survive him, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death." Nevertheless, the inscription he wrote for his headstone was, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
- "When I Have Fears" is a very personal confession of an emotion that intruded itself into the fabric of Keats' existence from at least 1816 on, the fear of an early death. The fact that both his parents were short-lived may account for the presence of this disturbing fear. In the poem, the existence of this fear annihilates both the poet's fame, which Keats ardently longed for, and the love that is so important in his poetry and in his life. As it happened, Keats was cheated by death of enjoying the fame that his poetry eventually gained for him and of marrying Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved so passionately. This fact gives the poem a pathos that helps to single it out from among the more than sixty sonnets Keats wrote. The "fair creature of an hour" that Keats addresses in the poem was probably a beautiful woman Keats had seen in Vauxhall Gardens, an amusement park, in 1814. Keats makes her into an archetype of feminine loveliness, an embodiment of Venus, and she remained in his memory for several years; in 1818, he addressed to her the sonnet "To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments at Vauxhall." While many poems and sonnets present death as an evil clock driving the artist and human insane, Keats acknowledges and responds to this phenomenon. “When I Have Fears” presents death as less of the clichéd limit and more of a freedom from anxiety. The fear is therefore not just about death, but about failing during the limited time alive. In the poem, death turns everything into nothing, making such high hopes for fame and love not worth such intense stress, and making the art apparently not even worth discussing in terms of (im)mortality. This somewhat nihilistic and existential perspective that unlimited values are rendered meaningless by a limited life actually calm the speaker’s angst and despair. This can be applied not only to the life of an artist or a poet but of every mortal, as death is both the cause and solution of our problems, the fear and the remedy. The three quatrains are subordinate clauses dependent on the word "when"; the concluding couplet is introduced by the word "then." The sonnet, like "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," is constructed with care. Like "Chapman's Homer," it is concerned with the subject of poetry, to which Keats adds another favorite theme, that of love. The poet's concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love) is supported by the repetition of "when" at the beginning of each quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers ("faery power"), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought ("I feel" and "unreflecting love"). Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12). Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet.
- Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12). Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet. In the opening lines, the speaker has clearly identified one of his fears for the reader. It is not merely the cliché death that worries the poet, but the very specific and mildly unique fear that he may not achieve his full creative potential (“full ripened grain”) by the time death arrives (in the form of “high-piled books” he has written). Such anxiety is relatable to any artist and any human being who is dissatisfied with his or her current state, or those who fear the limitations of life despite the unlimited nature of their ideas (before his pen has even “gleaned” his “teeming brain”). The first quatrain emphasizes both how fertile his imagination is and how much he has to express; hence the imagery of the harvest, e.g., "glean'd," "garners," "full ripen'd grain." Subtly reinforcing this idea is the alliteration of the key words "glean'd," garners," and "grain," as well as the repetition of r sounds in "charactery," "rich," "garners,"ripen'd," and "grain.". A harvest is, obviously, fulfillment in time, the culmination which yields a valued product, as reflected in the grain being "full ripen'd." Abundance is also apparent in the adjectives "high-piled" and "rich." The harvest metaphor contains a paradox (paradox is a characteristic of Keats's poetry and thought): Keats is both the field of grain (his imagination is like the grain to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry).
- The speaker looks up at the sky’s mighty constellations, perhaps beautiful, and he fears that he will “cease to be” before even tracing their shadows. The artist’s job, of course, is to trace or represent in his or her respective medium—for that is the definition of art. We have thus established Keats’s fear of achieving artistic success and fame (as he will identify later). However, the use of the word romance can also be taken in the more cultural sense relating to romantic relationships—a vital component of Keats’s fears: He sees the world as full of material he could transform into poetry (his is "the magic hand"); the material is the beauty of nature ("night's starr'd face") and the larger meanings he perceives beneath the appearance of nature or physical phenomena ("Huge cloudy symbols") .
- The “and” tells the reader that in addition to this fear of failure in the poetic department, the speaker is also concerned with having never experienced the majesty of solid love or getting another chance to see this potential lover (who is limited by, and at the mercy of, time as she is but a “creature of an hour”). This can be read that the fear exists during the present—not that he will “never look upon [her] more” or “never have relish in the fairy power” because he will be dead but because of the fact that he will never succeed in doing so in life (nor will he have unlimited time to do so). This establishes the second and final components that make up the speaker’s fears: failure in the realm of love. These two aspects make up the overall truth that can be better generalized by saying that, “The speaker simultaneously faces the opportunities life holds for him and the threat of his own untimely death” Keats turns to love. As the "fair creature of an hour," his beloved is short-lived just as, by implication, love is. The quatrain itself parallels the idea of little time, in being only three and a half lines, rather than the usual four lines of a Shakespearean sonnet; the effect of this compression or shortening is of a slight speeding-up of time. (Is love as important as, less important than, or more important than poetry for Keats in this poem? Does the fact that he devotes fewer lines to love than to poetry suggest anything about their relative importance to him?)
- These last two lines sound even more nihilistic than existential, as the reader might envision Keats himself standing alone on the edge of the universe, trying to get perspective and reflect on these fears. Keats thinks that such woe seems hard to despair because in the end, these desires he feels so panicked to attain despite time’s “cruel hand,” sink to nothingness, lost in the cleansing and eternal waves of the water to which he looks. Reflecting upon his feelings, which the act of writing this sonnet has involved, Keats achieves some distancing from his own feelings and ordinary life; this distancing enables him to reach a resolution. He thinks about the human solitariness ("I stand alone") and human insignificance (the implicit contrast betwen his lone self and "the wide world"). The shore is a point of contact, the threshold between two worlds or conditions, land and sea; so Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn.
- When Keats experiences feelings of fear (1) that he may die before he has written the volumes of poetry that he is convinced he is capable of writing, (2) that he may never write a long metrical romance, fragments of which float through his mind, and (3) that he may never again see a certain woman and so never experience the raptures of passionate love — then he feels that he is alone in the world and that love and fame are worthless. Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12). Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet. The three quatrains are subordinate clauses dependent on the word "when"; the concluding couplet is introduced by the word "then." The sonnet, like "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," is constructed with care. Like "Chapman's Homer," it is concerned with the subject of poetry, to which Keats adds another favorite theme, that of love. The poet's concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love) is supported by the repetition of "when" at the beginning of each quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers ("faery power"), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought ("I feel" and "unreflecting love").