When i Have Fears That i May Cease To Be Flashcards
Summary
This poem was written in 1818, only a few short years before Keats’ own death. It is primarily a poem about Keats’ fear of mortality, however in true Keatsian fashion, death is also the solution for more of what ails Keats. It would be prudent to remember that Keats’ poems have all, in some way, featured death; death of nature, death of love, death of memory, but death all in all. There are few poems, in fact, that do not reference the ending of things.
When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be is effusive with imagery, sensual in its description of the fears that Keats possesses, and short. Keats runs the gamut from worrying about dying before he is famous, worrying about the death of his beloved, and then deciding that death itself is not such a terrible situation.
Death
? It is not merely death, therefore, that worries Keats, but death in infamy – ironic, as he is now one of the most renowned names of English poetry. In fact, Keats was so sure that he would die without creating a ripple in the world of English poetry that his tombstone was made out to the one ‘whose name was writ in water’, thus showing the transience of Keats’ fame. He also feared that he would not be able to achieve his full capacity in terms of writing. He feared the limitations of his life.
Fertility
The use of fertility words – ‘gleaned, ‘garners’, ‘full ripen’d grain’ – subtly reinforces the idea of the artist’s creation and his mind as a fertile landscape. Keats views his imagination as a field of grain, wherein he is both the man harvesting, and the product being harvested.
Second Quatrain
The second quatrain shows Keats viewing the beauty of the natural world. This natural world, full of miracles, is what Keats decides he can transform into poetry; the material that he works with is Keats’ own medium, the medium of nature – ‘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;’ shows the nature of Keats’ fleeting beauty, and contrasts the immortality of nature with the transience of Keats’ verse.
As an artist, he fears the lack – he is terrified that he will die before doing justice to the beauty of nature, however, paradoxically, he is also terrified of not achieving the artistry that he has dreamed of, of not doing justice to the beauty of nature, even should the opportunity to write about them present itself. The further reference to ‘high romance’ could also show Keats’ terrors about not finding the right person to fall in love with. Keats feared being lonely, as well, and the woman that he met and fell in love with – Fanny Brawne – was never consummated in a formal marriage, as her mother wouldn’t give him consent to marry. He died betrothed to Fanny, in Italy, though it was clear from their discovered correspondence that neither Fanny nor Keats believed they would meet each other again in Keats’ final year alive. From a letter from Franny Brawne to Frances Keats, ““All I do is to persuade myself, I shall never see him again.”
Third Quatrain
In the final stanza, he turns to the idea of love. The use of the phrase ‘fair creature of an hour’ shows that even his love is not immortal; the crux of this poem is the short nature of love, of creativity, of everything that had given Keats a glimmering view on life. The opening of the quatrain with the word ‘and’ shows that it is an additional fear of Keats’, to not only have never achieved artistic mastery, but also to never see his potential lover again (which, as history shows, turns out to be true; he never did see Fanny Brawne alive again). Thus we get to the dual terrors that haunted Keats’ life – the opportunities provided by life, and his inability to live up to them. Keats is terrified of failure, more than death, almost; to have achieved love, and then to lose it, seems to Keats to be the biggest terror.
The final two lines give the poem an overarching feeling of misery and despair – Keats finds himself standing alone, trying to understand these fears, and not managing. Thus, no matter if he attains these fears, or if he doesn’t, Keats will still be anxious and worried and life will still be scared.
