John Keats’s “When I Have Fears” treats the fear of death in an unflinchingly noble fashion
declaration, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever,” his poems and letters will long endure as sources of jubilation. His odes—“to a Nightingale,” “on a Grecian Urn” and “on Melancholy”—may be the greatest in the language. And his sonnets are not only well wrought but unusually moving, because the “I” in Keats wins our affection and never seems overly self-involved. In an era of the “egotistical sublime” , Keats’s life and work demonstrate that poetry is not a career but a vocation.
Adhering to the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet, the poem consists of just one sentence stretched over 14 lines. The first 12 advance the theme in three four-line movements . The eloquent closing couplet provides the “then” on which all these dependent clauses rest. It raises the poem from trepidation to a kind of visionary heroism.
A rich simile concludes the first movement of the poem: “Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, / Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain.” Keats uses “in charactery” as we would say “in print”; he is imagining the grandeur of publication. Note the double alliteration—“rich garners,” “ripened grain”—that makes the line so characteristic of a poet whose words you can almost taste.
In his masterly study “Shakespeare,” scholar and poet Mark Van Doren argued that the weak part of a Shakespeare sonnet may be its closing couplet. Not here. “Then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.” As he positions himself at the edge of the world, in intense contemplation of a dire fate, Keats arrives at a transcendent moment.
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