John keats when i have fears

The speaker of the poem fears death before he puts down all the booming ideas in his brain. He compares his ideas to grain and the books to the garners in a simile. He says that love floats high in the starry night. This shows that the speaker has no real hopes for love as he searches for it high in the sky, rather than in front of him on the land.

He also thinks that he would not experience romance because the luck will not favor him. The speaker then fears that even if he does love, his love would not be returned, however magical and powerful the love may be. He also says that the object of his love, the fair creature may not be so fair for all time, not even for the next hour or the next day, and he fears this too.

When the speaker has such thoughts, he stands on the brink of the shore of this wide world we live in. He stands there and watches as his desires and love lose importance in front of the vast world. He watches as they eventually fade away. The last two lines which contain the above meaning make a couplet, which has the turn of the poem or the twist in the tale.

John keats when i have fears: "When I Have Fears" is

Normal sonnets have this in the 8th line of the poem. But Shakespearean sonnets differ in this aspect by including the turn only in the last two lines. The desires of the poet, his yearning for love and his fear of death which he so profoundly claims throughout the remaining 10 lines of the poem are turned obsolete in the last two lines.

When things are kept in perspective, he sees that all that he wants is but a point in infinity. According to G. Kittridge, in Sonnets of Shakespeare, "Shadow, often in Shakespeare is contrasted with substance to express the particular sort of unreality while 'substance' expresses the reality. The Complete Poems. Penguin UK, Moxon, The Poems of John Keats.

John keats when i have fears: "When I have Fears

OCLC Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations. New York: Routledge, At times the language, allusion, or thought is so elliptical as to be obscure. While Keats uses a vocabulary that could apply metaphorically to a mortal woman, he could mean a momentarily imagined vision. We think about feelings, actions, love, and mysteries.

The brain is a source of being, but as we use it to imagine, we sink into unthinking inactivity and death. We think until thought ends; like life, the poem raises thoughts that come to an end. The iambic pentameter lines, each of ten syllables, are made mostly of words of one or two syllables. Although the rhythm is regular with a pause at the end of lines after most rhyme words, the five lines 1, 7, 11, 12, and 13 without end pauses increase the forward momentum.

We are conscious of such pauses because there are few earlier lines 3, 5, 8, and 9 and most occur in the first half the line. It would seem a fair statement that the wide popularity of the poem rests almost entirely on the sentiments expressed in the first quatrain. The second quatrain has proven to be difficult and mysterious to commentators, though, unlike the third, it is generally admired.

The only full studies of the sonnet are by M. Goldberg and T. The two quatrains treat entirely different problems and raise entirely different questions. This final thought is the culmination of the musings begun in each quatrain and is the logical and emotional conclusion of each.

John keats when i have fears: When I have fears that I

It is a single sentence with each of the three quatrains containing independent imagistic concepts related to a common theme and ending in a couplet which is not only the logical and emotional conclusion of each, as noted, but the grammatical conclusion of each as well. There is a cause and effect relationship between each quatrain and the couplet, and it is possible to make three completely satisfactory poems by appending the final two and a half lines to each quatrain; the effect of the quatrains, however, is cumulative, and each adds an enriching variation to a theme.

In the first quatrain Keats expresses his fear, not of dying, but of a time when death will curtail his ability to write. There can be little doubt that the strongest of these is verse. Two-thirds of the poem is about poetry and the way it is written; his fear is not for himself or even for unfulfilled personal experiences, but that there will not be time to write.

The possession of unhurried time as a necessary ingredient in the production of poetry and in meaningful human love is the strong integument which binds together seemingly disparate parts of the poem. It is an organic concept in which Keats sees slow time wedded to process; though this concept of time is discussed in each quatrain, it is no doubt most easily seen in the famous autumn metaphor at the beginning of the poem.

The autumn season as a topos of completion is, of course, an ancient one, but it seemed to be especially appealing to Keats in that it represented the end of a slow-moving inevitable development, the conclusion of which was implicit in its beginning. In the sonnet, the poet is all too aware that he is barely past his seed time. Great fecundity is implicit in the image of the teeming brain, but also implicit is the understanding that this abundance is inchoate and must experience the gleaning pen which will separate poetic chaff from grain.

And even after time and season have brought forth a field ready for the harvest, the gleaning pen must perform its selective task so that only rich garners may be kept. The first quatrain ends with a vision of work wonderfully fulfilled; the second quatrain is an investigation into the way such work is conceived and written, and in this way is an extension and amplification of concepts already introduced.

The poet is an awed observer, not only of the magnificent display of stars in the clear night sky, but of a vast inspirational field from which future poems may be fashioned. It is an image of infinite but as yet unformed possibility, glorious in the promise of an accomplishment still free from a less than perfect actuality. It is not only that Keats is inspired by nature, as he surely is, but that the empyrean contains symbolic information which, if properly followed, can be transmuted into poetry; but such a paraphrase is too literalistic and formulaic for the experience Keats goes on to describe.

Because the essence of his reaction is an unforced intuitive response, he foils any attempt at a simply rational reduplication. In a series of carefully chosen images, he takes us, step by step, with a logic which seeks to subvert logic, ever further away from ratiocinative investigation. The face of the night is clear, but the symbols which it contains are huge and cloudy.

But he johns keats when i have fears how far he is from any kind of apprehension of this essence; even the symbols of it are huge and cloudy and he contemplates no greater nearness than to trace the shadows of these symbols. Indeed, even this tracing of shadows cannot be a volitional act, for it must be done with the hand of chance. It can mean a sensational narrative of the extraordinary adventures of its hero, showing that the speaker foresees the possibility of glory.

This juxtaposition highlights the fact that only one of the possibilities — living out his fate or dying before he can — can actually occur, hinting at the acceptance of his death that the speaker will reach in the final couplet.