When I have fears that I may cease to be Essay

In this paper I would like to analyze John Keats’s “When I Have Fears that I may cease to be”.
No doubt, the literary career of Keats’s lasted over six years (1814-1819) and its ended when the time of maturity came to him. He died at twenty-five years, and he stopped his writing a year before his death.
The textbook famous sonnet by John Keats “When I Have Fears …” was written in 1818 and first was published in 1848. “The prophetic longing” of 23-year-old poet, and premonition of a possible infeasibility of the high life purpose expressed here with a rare lyrical force. The idea of ​​an early death, which interrupted intense spiritual work to date, made the creative quest vain and took away poet shared love joy and led poet to a tragic awareness of his isolation from the world’s best and unfulfilled aspirations.
Emotional expression enhanced by an unusual thematic material and the syntactic structure of strophic division of the sonnet. Sonnet is written in the form of the period and represents an expanded complex sentence with a three-term concurrency of subordinate clauses of time, each of which is entirely (except the last) corresponds quatrains, which is opened by anaphora: “When I. ..”, “When I. ..”, “And when I. .. “. The final line of the sonnet also has the subordinate clause of time, and the main sentence, marked out by pronoun then is placed on the main stanza border – between the third quatrains and the final couplet. The stanzaical transfer at syntagma “then on the shore / Of the wide world” breaks the closest syntactic attribute communication in the sentence, dramatically highlighting the most important semantic core of the sonnet: limiting, the finiteness of the “wide world” on the edge of which the poet stands face to face with the emptiness.
Sentence parallelism, is combined with the undeniable dynamics sense. The location of the thematic material is followed by romantic values gradation (1 st quatrain – the mind, 2 nd quatrain – intuition, the third quatrain — emotion). We can see contrast between the plan and the perception of the potential unrealizability of poet’s hopes and achievements: the sphere of intelligence (1 st quatrain) is given via a direct sense of fear (“When I have fears …”), scope of imagination (2-nd quatrain) is given through contemplation and meditation (“When I behold … and think”), and only on top of emotional stress (third quatrain) element of sense prevails (“And when I feel”).
To sum it up I should say that Just poet premonition of close death puts him on the edge between “all” and “nothing”, making aware of the possible inaccessibility of life mission.