When I Have Fear Annotation

John Keat’s sonnet “When I have fear that I may cease to be” deliberates human mortality and the simultaneous importance and meaninglessness of elements in the speaker’s life. Additionally, it expresses reasons for his apprehension towards the future. The speaker in this poem exhibits many similarities to Keats himself, namely an impending premature death, accordingly, it can be asserted that Keats is the speaker himself. For most of the poem, the speaker merely contemplates his own morality to himself, however towards the end of the sonnet a potential person that the speaker may be talking to is a lover. No specific occasion or setting can be extracted from this sonnet, however an event in the speaker’s life could have triggered a feeling …show more content…
Although the specific nature metaphor has stopped, the speaker continues to relate his struggles to the nature that surrounds him. In the next line of the poem the speaker then compares “a high romance” to huge clouds that are located in the sky with the stars (6). This secondary comparison that the speaker sets up can both relate to the speaker’s love life as well as future ambitions for writings that he has. In the first manner, the speaker compares this “romance” to clouds to both suggest that love in itself is above all else in the world, or that a certain type of love, “high” love, resembles the clouds because it is so close to heaven that it is almost celestial (6). However, the next line reverts back to the hopelessness that the speaker outlined earlier in the sonnet as he fears that he “will never live to trace their shadows with the magic hand of chance” (6-7). Moreover, the speaker is afraid that he will never get the chance to experience the highest form of love that anyone could ever hope to experience, and he argues that this type of love is mostly due to chance. Although this first interpretation of these line can be logically deduced from the sonnet, the more compelling argument is that the speaker refers to his career as these “cloudy symbols” (6). An alternative meaning of ‘romance’ that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary denotes is a “medieval tale based on legend, chivalric love and adventure, or the supernatural”. The speaker fears that he may “never live to trace”, or write these types of stories–the clouds– that gave others before him success and fame (7-8). These stories are so high up and above everything else that the ultimate goal for the speaker is to join this class of literary masters that produced these stories before him before he dies. However, due to his unlucky