Analysis Of John Keats When I Have Fears

“When I have Fears” is narrated by a poet with great ambitions who is struggling with the idea that he might die before he fulfills them. The tone of the poem shifts from hopeless to nearly nihilistic, as the final image is of the speaker watching love and fame leave him and become nothing. Part of this rejection in meaning stems from the way Keats presents death in this specific poem. How the speaker feels about death in “When I have Fears” differs greatly from, “Ode to a Nightingale.” Instead of the speaker being “half in love with easeful Death” the speaker resents death as it means the end of his sizable ambitions. However, while there is the sense of a great loss in the final lines, there is also acceptance. By standing at “the shore/Of the wide world” and thinking alone, the speaker comes to terms with his place in the world. Whether or not the speaker has come to terms with his mortality and how he came to that conclusion hinges on how deliberate his actions throughout the poem are. The speaker creates a somewhat depressing image of love as the fanciful imagery Keats uses has a darker …show more content…
Just as he stands on a physical divide between the land and ocean, he is caught between rejecting loss and accepting it. By actively observing the complexities of the death of his dreams, he finds the dual-nature of many things. When compared against the scope of the world, love and fame are not such all-important concepts after all. The speaker changes his perception of the end of his dreams by getting a broader understanding of the world by standing and thinking, looking at, “the wide world.” This images is vast in its own way, but instead of serving as a reminder of all that the speaker cannot reach it shows him how small his ambitions are. In that way, he understands how his ambitions might yield nothing, but for a different