The Fears Of John Keats And Dylan Thomas

Every individual has encountered or will encounter death one day. Two poets, John Keats and Dylan Thomas, have both been affected by the limited time they or their loved ones have. In Keats’s case, he spent most of his adolescence and adulthood suffering from tuberculosis, an infectious bacterial disease with a high probability of death during the 17th and 18th century. Knowing that he had a limited time to live, Keats was morbidly fascinated with the thought of his own demise. As a result, in 1818, Keats originally wrote “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be” to express his concerns about dying before he will be able to achieve any of his goals in an enclosed letter to his dear friend John Hamilton Reynolds. Although Keats lived a short …show more content…
In Keat’s poem, the speaker uses repetition to stress the fact that he fears death. The speaker repeats “when I” (1,5,9) and “before” (2-3) to show his constant fears of not being able to accomplish everything he would like to before he dies. The repetition of “when I” shows that the speaker still has some hope in completing his desires before he dies. However, near the end of the poem, the speaker uses inversion when he says “Of the wide world I stand alone” (13) to make the phrase more dramatic and meaningful. From this, readers can imagine the speaker standing on the edge of a cliff where he comes to a realization that he is just one person compared to the millions of others around him. Therefore, he will face his death alone, “and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink” (13-14), to reflect on his small fears. In the end, Keats’s speaker understands that his desires seem so panicked because of the short amount of time he has left to live. In Thomas’s poem, he arranges his poem into a villanelle with the repetition of two lines: “Do not go gentle into that good night” (1,6,12,18) and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (3,9,15,19). The repetition of these lines adds emphasis and meaning to his plead towards his father. However, each time the speaker uses these phrases, it has a different meaning as the poem progresses. When the speaker says “Do not go gentle into that good night” the first time, he is commanding his father to fight for his life. The second and third time the speaker uses this phrase when he compares his father to “good men” (7) and “wild me” (10) because these men would not give up so easily. The last time the speaker says “do not go gentle into that good night” (19), he is finally begging his father to not leave him. The speaker feels that “rag[ing] against the dying of the light” (19) will allow his father to die with some dignity instead of “go[ing] gentl[ly]” (18), but the