When I have fears that I may cease to be is an Elizabethan sonnet written by John Keats. The poem, written in the first person, charts the desires and despairs of the speaker.
“When I have fears that I may cease to be” is an Elizabethan sonnet written by John Keats. The poem, written in the first person, charts the desires and despairs of the speaker. The speaker, realising his imminent death, regrets his inability to achieve fame and his incapability of living life to the fullest. The poem expresses Keats’s melancholic nature, his fears and is reflective of the turmoil in his life at that time.
The first quatrain is an expression of the speaker’s regretfulness. Although he has a “teeming brain” abound with vivid imagery and vibrant ideas, he fears he will “cease to be” or die before he can recount them. The speaker believes his imagination could fill “high-piled books, in character” or a large number of books. Keats’s diction translates the imagery of harvest; this is achieved through the usage of words associated with farming, “garners”, “grains”, “gleaned”. The harvest imagery acts as a metaphor, the speaker’s imagination is the field of grain and the speaker is the harvester. Essentially, the speaker fears he will be the unsuccessful famer who failed to “glean” his land.
