When I Have Fears-John Keats

A When I have fears that I may cease to be

B Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

A Before high-piled books, in charactery,

B Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

C When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

D Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

C And think that I may never live to trace

D Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

E And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

f That I shall never look upon thee more,

E Never have relish in the faery power

f Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore

g Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

g Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Narrator: 1st Person (Keats himself)Tone: anxious, solemn, melancholyMood: sensory, solitary, mysticalSetting: Within the author’s own mindTheme: Fleeting, mystical nature of love, life and fame.Meter: Iambic PentameterRyhme: ABABType of poem: Lyric PoemType of lyric poem: SonnetType of sonnet: Shakespearean /Elizabethan

Very distinctive style, which is marked by the presence of archaic words borrowed from the Elizabethan poets.

Feelings of Fear Overall: that he may die before he has written the

volumes of poetry that he is convinced he is capable of writing

that he may never write a long metrical romance, fragments of which float through his mind, and

that he may never again see a certain woman and so never experience the raptures of passionate love

he feels that he is alone in the world and that love and fame are worthless.

1st Quatrain:

Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 14: Keats uses temporal indicators as the first word of each of these lines, creating a feeling of expectation through the use of repetition.

Line 2. glean: in this poem, Keats is using the meaning of collecting patiently or picking out laboriously.

teeming: plentiful, overflowing, or produced in large quantities.

Line 3. charactery: printing or handwriting.

Line 4. garners: granaries or storehouses for grain.

Line 4: Language compared to wheat in a grain bin= simile

Emphasizes: how fertile his imagination is how much he has to express

o imagery of the harvest: glean'd, garners, full ripen'd

graino Alliteration of the key words glean'd,

garners, and graino Repetition of R sounds in character,

rich, garners, ripen'd, and grain.o Harvest:

fulfillment in time yields a valued product reflected in the grain being "full

ripen'd." abundance= the adjectives high-

piled and rich harvest metaphor contains a

paradox: Keats = field of grain

(his imagination is like the grain to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry).

2nd Quatrain:

Line 5: Personifying the night by turning its stars into a "face" allows the speaker to interact with it as he would a real person.

Lines 5-6: Night and clouds become symbols of love. (Heavenly, lofty, unattainable)

Line 6. high romance: high = of an elevated or exalted character or quality; romance = medieval narrative of chivalry, also an idealistic fiction which tends not to be realistic.

Lines 6-7: Tracing the face of love with the hand of chance= imagery hand of chance= personification

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")

the larger meanings he perceives beneath the appearance of nature or physical phenomena ("Huge cloudy symbols") .

He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8)

3rd Quatrain: Line 9: The "fair creature" = image of the

natural world, but a weak one; unlike the sky or the world, she'll grow old and pass away.

concerns love his beloved is short lived; "fair creature of an

hour," just like love itself 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

o the effect of this compression or shortening is of a slight speeding-up of time= change of pace

Fears that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12).

Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12.

Last two lines: (couplet) Line 13: "wide world" = image of nature in

general – a world far too big to understand. concern with time:

o not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love

o supported by : the repetition of "when" at

the beginning of each quatrain

the shortening of the third quatrain.

attributes two qualities to love: 1. it has the ability to transform the

world for the lovers

("faery power") but fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion

2. loves forces you to lead with emotion rather than thought:

("I feel" and "unreflecting love").

Keats reflects upon his own feelings in this sonnet, allowing him to achieve some distance from his emotions and the influences of the outside world, enabling him to reach a resolution.

He thinks about:o human solitariness ("I stand alone") o human insignificance (the implicit

contrast between his lone self and "the wide world")

The shore=point of contact, 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- a passage from the tumultuous and ever-fluctuating seas of desire to a stable, permanent sense of self.

Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet.

Symbols: Negative Capability:

o Definition: The use of negative

capability in literature is a concept promoted by Keats, who was of the opinion that literary achievers, especially poets, should be able to come to terms with the fact that some matters might have to be left unsolved and uncertain. Keats was of the opinion that some certainties were best left open to imagination and that the element of doubt and ambiguity added romanticism and specialty to a concept.

o philosophical stance= allowed Keats to seek out and dwell in the uncertainties of life without trying to make sense of it all. Art (poetry) allows Keats to play though his uncertainties in all sorts of wonderful and really, really uncomfortable ways.

o Line 1: Keats begins the poem with a deliberate contemplation of his death

o Line 5-8: An elaborate metaphor imagines love as something that is written on the night sky- delightful and far too grand to contemplate on a personal level;

Love = huge and terrifying, something not to be undertaken by mere mortals.

o Lines 11-12: Love becomes a fairy power in this metaphor:

super-magical and supernatural. o Keats pushes love to two very different

extremes= Negative Capability o Lines 12-14: image of the speaker

pulling away from the world to stand on its shore is another one of the huge, fantastic images, enforces Keats' idea of negative capability.

allows him to imagine love and fame=

most important things in the world

absolutely unimportant. Nature

o Night and clouds, world, faeries, shore vs. land

o Contributes to Negative Capability Figurative Language

o Simile o Metaphoro Personification

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?

Compose a thesis statement in which you examine how the poet employs symbolism and metaphor to convey his contrasting feelings toward love and poetry.