Analysis of 'When I Have Fears' by John Keats

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When I Have Fears by John Keats The poem written by John Keats called “When I Have Fears” is a sonnet which expresses the speaker’s fears of death before fulfilling his love and fame. The title “When I Have Fears” furthermore, foreshadows the theme of the poem; the speaker’s fear of his own death which seems to be near, although what he is most afraid of is his inability to experience his love and completing his tasks as a poet before his life ends. Through the course of the poem, the speaker depicts his deep fear for failing to achieve his ambition but triumph over his fear by realizing nothingness of what he desired the most: love and fame. The poem starts powerful by introducing the speaker’s fear of death and his ambition to capture all his ideas onto paper. The very first line “When I have fears that I may cease to be” grabs the reader’s attention at once because death is a universal fear. It also helps create a mood of dark, heavy, serious and sadness and helps depict the speaker’s melancholy clearly throughout the poem. The speaker continues on, illustrating his overflowing ideas as “my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” He is being portrayed as trying to note down all his ideas in his head with his pen before he faces death. However, he is struggling to write down his ideas because he depicts his fear of his thoughts that are still not captured on a paper. His idea “like rich garners the full ripen’d grain” is a imagery of harvest and an alliteration with the same ‘g’ sound in ‘garners’ and ‘grain’ and ‘r’ sound in ‘garners’ ‘ripen’ and ‘grain’. A harvest is represented as his fulfillment of ambition which produces high quality product which the speaker believe is his fame, portrayed as grain that is “full ripen’d”. In addition, the metaphor of harvest holds a paradox. The speaker is both conveyed as grain and the person harvesting the grain. Grain

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