“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” John Keats John Keats (p. 788) (1795-1821)
Those who leave a lasting imprint on the world do not always live long. When the life of a groundbreaking figure is cut short, it leaves the world asking, What more might this person have achieved, if only he or she had lived longer? John Keats is such a figure. Although he died at age twenty-five, Keats left his indelible mark on literature, and this makes us wonder what more he might have accomplished had he lived longer.
A Defender of Worthy Causes Unlike his contemporaries Bryon and Shelley, John Keats was not an aristocrat. Instead, he was born to working-class Londoners. As a child, he received attention for his striking good looks and his restless spirit. Keats developed a reputation for fighting, but always for a worthy cause. It was not until he and his school-master’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, became friends that Keats developed an interest in poetry and became an avid reader.
From Medicine to Poetry In 1815, Keats began studying medicine at a London hospital. He had already begun writing poetry, but he earned his pharmacist’s license before abandoning medicine for the literary world. In 1818, he published his first major work, Endymion, a long poem that critics panned. Their negative reviews were due in part to Keats’s association with the radical writer Leigh Hunt. The reviews also reflected the uneven quality of the verse itself. Despite the critical rejection, Keats did not swerve from his new career. Instead, he began writing the second of his long poems, Hyperion, a work he was never to complete.
A Year of Sorrow and Joy The year 1818 was significant for Keats in other ways as well. He lost his brother Tom to tuberculosis, but he also met the light of his life, Fanny Brawne, to whom he became engaged. The next year, 1819, was a period of feverish creativity. In just nine months, fired by grief, new-found love, and his own encroaching illness, Keats wrote the poems for which he is most famous, including “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” and his odes. Each is recognized as a masterpiece.
An Early Death Keats’s engagement to Fanny and his burst of creativity might have been the prelude to a happy, productive life. Instead, Keats found his health deteriorating. Recognizing that like his brother, he had tuberculosis, Keats moved to Italy, hoping that the warmer climate would reverse the disease. Sadly, that hope proved false, and in 1821, his battle with tuberculosis ended with his death. Keats wrote his own epitaph, which stresses the brevity of his life: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
A Legacy of Beauty Despite his early death and the fact that he composed his most important works in the space of just two years, John Keats remains one of the major influences in English poetry. Although he knew Percy Bysshe Shelley, he did not share Shelley’s rebellious spirit, nor did he believe in using poetry for political statements. Keats worked as a pure artist who labored under the banner of beauty. He found in beauty the highest value our imperfect world could offer, and he put its pursuit at the center of his poetry. In masterful verse, he explored the beauty he found in the most ordinary circumstances. At the same time, Keats was profoundly sensitive to the deep contradictions of life—of the sadness that every joy contains and the emptiness of every fulfillment. Although his best-remembered line is “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” the poem in which it appears, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” implicitly contrasts the frozen world of a painted scene with the world of change and decay in which we live. For Keats, striving after what can never be attained was perhaps the true poetic task.
Literary Analysis (p. 789) The Ode An ode is a lyric poem, characterized by heightened emotion, that pays respect to a person or thing, usually directly addressed by the speaker. • The Pindaric ode (named for the Greek poet Pindar) falls in groups of three stanzas, one of which differs from the other two. Pindar’s odes celebrated victors at the Olympic Games. • Roman poets later developed the Horatian ode, which contains only one type of stanza. • The irregular ode has no set pattern Keats created his own form of the ode, using ten-line stanzas of iambic pentameter (lines containing ten beats with a repeated pattern of unstressed-stressed). Often those stanzas begin with a heroic quatrain (four lines rhymed abab), followed by a sestet (six lines rhymed in various ways).
“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” John Keats Comparing Literary Works In his odes, Keats follows the tradition of paying respect to something. Yet his odes reveal as much about him as they do about his subjects. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” for instance, Keats finds himself caught by his longing for ideal beauty—a longing he cannot fulfill in real life. As you read, compare how each work dramatizes a conflict in the speaker. Analyze how the conflict is brought on by longings for what is far away.
“When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” (p. 792) John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, gleaned v. collected from bit by bit, Before high-piled books, in charactery,1 as when gathering stray grain after a Hold like rich garners2 the full ripened grain; harvest 5 When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, teeming adj. filled to overflowing And I 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, 10 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.
______1. charactery written or printed letters of the alphabet. 2. garners storehouses for grain.