Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Essays

Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Essays Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Paper Summary of the Poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be Paper gleand, garners, full ripend grain. Subtly reinforcing this idea is the alliteration of the key words gleand, garners, and grain, as well as the repetition of r sounds in charactery, rich, garners,ripend, and grain. . A harvest is, obviously, fulfillment in time, the culmination which yields a valued product, as reflected in the grain being full ripend. Abundance is also apparent in the adjectives high-piled and rich. The harvest metaphor contains a paradox (paradox is a characteristic of Keatss poetry and thought): Keats is both the field of grain (his imagination is like the grain to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry). In the next quatrain (lines 5-8), he sees the world as full of material he could transform into poetry (his is the magic hand); the material is the beauty of nature (nights starrd face) and the larger meanings he perceives beneath the appearance of nature or physical phenomena (Huge cl oudy symbols) . In the third quatrain (lines 9-12), he turns to love. As the fair creature of an hour, his beloved is short-lived just as, by implication, love is. The quatrain itself parallels the idea of little time, in being only three and a half lines, rather than the usual four lines of a Shakespearean sonnet; the effect of this compression or shortening is of a slight speeding-up of time. Is love as important as, less important than, or more important than poetry for Keats in this poem? Does the fact that he devotes fewer lines to love than to poetry suggest anything about their relative importance to him? The poets concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love) is supported by the repetition of when at the beginning of each quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers (faery power), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought (I feel and unreflecting love). Reflecting upon his feelings, which the act of writing this sonnet has involved, Keats achieves some distancing from his own feelings and ordinary life; this distancing enables him to reach a resolution. He thinks about the human solitariness (I stand alone) and human insignificance (the implicit contrast betwen his lone self and the wide world). The shore is a point of contact, the threshold between two worlds or conditions, land and sea; so Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn.