John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet (See: Background). From his first publication at age 20 to his death at age 25, Keats wrote several poems that became part of the English literary canon. Keats’s work is so firmly cemented in the English language that lines from his poetry have transcended the need for attribution, having ascended to the level of a figure of speech: “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever” (Keats, John. “from Endymion.” Poetry Foundation.).

Keats wrote “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” in 1818. The sonnet demonstrates a few signature features of Keats’s poetry, including emotional intensity, lush language, diligent formalism, and romantic imagery. The speaker fixates on their fear of death and their accompanying existential dread. The poem proved eerily prescient; Keats wrote it months before he contracted the tuberculosis infection that eventually killed him. “When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be” remained unpublished for nearly thirty years following Keats’s death. The poem was first published in 1848 amid the posthumous surge of interest in Keats’s poetry.

Poet Biography

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795 to Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings Keats. He was the eldest of four children. Thomas Keats worked as a stable manager for his father-in-law, John Jennings, at the Swan and Hoop Inn. Once John Jennings retired and Thomas Keats assumed ownership of the stable, the family had enough money to send eight-year-old Keats to the Clarke School in Enfield. Young Keats flourished at the small, progressive school. He was outgoing and passionate, a fierce defender of his friends, and not too bookish. In 1804, Thomas Keats died from injuries sustained in a horse-riding accident. Widowed Frances Keats moved the children in with their grandmother, Alice Jennings, before remarrying and leaving the family. She returned sick with tuberculosis in 1808 and died in 1810. It was during this time that Keats befriended the headmaster’s son, Charles Cowden Clarke, who encouraged Keats’s love of classics, literature, and poetry. Keats threw himself into his studies and became one of headmaster John Clarke’s top students.

After her daughter’s death, Alice Jennings appointed Richard Abbey to be the Keats children’s guardian. At his guardian’s insistence, Keats left the Clarke School in 1811 and was apprenticed to the surgeon Thomas Hammond. Keats maintained his friendship with the Clarkes through his apprenticeship. He encountered vital poetic models in Edmund Spenser and George Chapman, whose translation of Homer inspired the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816). According to his friend, by 1814 Keats was “entirely absorbed in poetry” (“John Keats.” Poetry Foundation). He wrote his first poem, “In Imitation of Spenser,” and left his apprenticeship to move to London in the same year. Charles Cowden Clarke also introduced Keats to Leigh Hunt, poet and editor of the Examiner, along with Hunt’s circle of liberal artists. It was through Hunt that Keats published his first poem: “Solitude” appeared in the Examiner in 1816.

Despite becoming a licensed apothecary in 1816, Keats resolved to never practice medicine and commit his life to poetry, much to Abbey’s dismay. Keats’s medical training had been expensive, and he would never achieve financial security. Poems (Olliers), his first book of poetry, was published on March 3, 1817. It included two of Keats’s first long poems, “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry.” Critics derided its overwrought language and sentimentality, and the Olliers were so embarrassed that Keats switched publishers. In April of 1817 Keats travelled to the Isle of Wight and began writing Endymion (Taylor and Hessey, 1818). He finished the 4,000-line retelling of the Greek myth in December of 1817. A slate of scathing reviews mocked "low-born" Keats’s high poetic ambitions. Keats fell ill while on a walking tour of the British Isles with Charles Armitage Brown in 1818. He returned home and likely contracted tuberculosis from his brother, Tom, who died of the disease in December.

Keats moved with Brown into his new home, Wentworth Place, in 1819. Keats fell even deeper in love with Frances “Fanny” Brawne, his acquaintance from the year before. Brawne and her mother moved in next door in April. Although Keats and Brawne were engaged by October of that year, Brawne’s mother forbade her from marrying a financially unstable poet. Keats wrote much of his most highly praised work in 1819, including “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Lamia,” all six odes, and the second version of his unfinished epic poem, Hyperion. All of these and more appeared in his third volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820). This book received the warmest critical reception yet. Keats’s health continued to decline, and in 1820, Keats moved to the warmer climate of Rome on his doctor’s advice. Artist Joseph Severn accompanied Keats and nursed him through the final stages of tuberculosis.

John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821. Per his last wishes, Severn and Brown included the following words on his tombstone: “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water” (Reynolds, Ian. “The Gravestone of John Keats: Romancing the Stone.” Wordsworth Grasmere. 16 April 2018).

Poem Text

When I have fears that I may cease to be  

 Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,  

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,  

 Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;  

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,  

 Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,  

And think that I may never live to trace  

 Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;  

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!  

 That I shall never look upon thee more,  

Never have relish in the faery power  

 Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore  

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think  

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Keats, John. “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be.” 1848. Poets.org.

Summary

John Keats’s “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be” is a Shakespearean sonnet. The speaker of the poem opens by confessing their recurring fear of death. They elaborate with a few anxiety-provoking scenarios. First, they worry that they will die before they manage to write down everything in their “teeming brain” (Line 2). The speaker imagines the “high-piled books” (Line 3) full of their thoughts, fearful that premature death would prevent them from realizing this vision. Next, the speaker contemplates a night sky full of stars. They “behold” (Line 5) the awesome sight of “symbols of a high romance” (Line 6) with awe. In these moments, the speaker worries that they may not live long enough “to trace / Their shadows” (Lines 7-8). Finally, the speaker expresses worries that death will separate them from their beloved “creature of an hour” (Line 9). Losing this connection, the ability to “look upon” (Line 10) their companion, means the speaker will no longer enjoy the pleasure of “unreflecting love” (Line 12).

The speaker concludes the poem by describing their reaction to these feelings: they stand at the edge of “the wide world” (Line 13) in quiet contemplation. Alone with their thoughts and fears, the speaker thinks and thinks until both “love and fame” (Line 14) lose all meaning.