Death And Death In John Keats's When I Have Fears

While both Keats and Longfellow often reflect on their own unfulfilled dreams and impending deaths, the poems however contrast on their own dispositions towards death and the future. Here, Keats expresses a fear of not having enough time to accomplish all that he believes he is capable of doing, but as he recognizes the enormity of the world and his own limitations of life, he realizes that his own mortal goals are meaningless in the long run of things. On the other hand, Longfellow speaks of a regret towards his inaction for allowing time to slip away from him in his past and is at a crossroads for the ominous future that looms ahead of him. Through the use of light and dark imagery, and personification, Keats and Longfellow similarly yet also differently, reflect on their own ideas for death and the futures that lay ahead of them.

A similarity between the two poems is that they both surround the fear of dying before accomplishing life dreams. In “When I have Fears”, Keats is afraid of his life ending before he has a chance to leave a mark on the world by becoming a famous poet. You can see this in lines 1 and 2 of

As people near the time of their deaths, they begin to reflect upon the history and events of their own lives. Both John Keats’ “When I have Fears” and Henry Longfellow’s “Mezzo Cammin” reflect upon the speakers’ fears and thoughts of death. However, the conclusions between these two poems end quite differently. Although both reflect upon Death’s grasp, Keats’ displays an appreciation and subtle satisfaction with the wonders of life, while Longfellow morbidly mourns his past inactions and fears what events the future may bring.

The similarities in the poem deal with similar topics expressed throughout the poem dealing with Keats’ and Longfellow’s fear of death. Differences between the two include the structure and the different images, metaphors and diction that they give off along with their different train of thoughts while writing the two poems. Their thoughts of the subject of death are able to relate to a variety of people because everyone is just human and cannot last forever. Just as these two poems show similar ideas can branch off into many different ideas and interpretations. The desire to continue to

The theme of Dylan Thomas and W.B Yeats poems are about death. In Do Not Go “Gentle Into The Good Night” the author is telling his father not to die and to stay strong. He does this by repeating ”Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” In ” When You Are Old “The narrator said” And pace upon the mountain overhead And his face amid a crowd of stars.” The narrator is looking down on her from when he passed away.

if you look at his poem. After the 1st half of the 3rd stanza, all the

“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.” Socrates one of the greek philosophers in the 400’s BC, gives a reasonable question about the fear of death. Death affects people and characters very differently in life. In the world of literary works two very well known authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe present two works that both deal with the effects of this very thing the fear of death. Laid out in the next few pages we shall see that there are many connections to

“What do you want to do before you die?” It is a question asked in many situations; college interviews, when you discover a terminal illness, or even during a discussion in your English class. Usually it takes people a minute to think up their list of aspirations, though some can spurt out their compilation in a matter of seconds. It all depends on how much prior thought you’ve put into the topic. In my case, I’d never deeply considered what I’d like to accomplish before death until I read the poem “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” by John Keats. After reading this poem and understanding what Keats was saying, I took some time to compose a checklist for things to do while I have the time to do them. Before I die, I want to graduate

Showing, that to him, existence and purpose is more important than any other distraction in life. Unfortunately, it seems to John Keats that life itself is the distraction. Constantly being obsessed with any aspect of life is an unhealthy way to live. The tone is identified immediately when Keats begins with a very common human fear, the fear of death. His sense of paranoia to premature death reinforces the central idea in that it reveals the authors personal struggles with the concept of life and death.

Fear. Death. Responsibilities. A man advanced in his years, writes simply enough to explain his view to the whole world. After Frost's death, people figured, from his writings, that he was afraid of dying. Giving up all of his responsibilities and meeting God up above. While aging, he lost his creativity he had and wrote about his fear of death and how the spark of imagination fled his mind (Greiner, Donald J. “Robert Frost.”).

“Necrophobia, or the fear of death, is the second top fear in the US, with 68% of the population fearing death” (Bowerman). The fear of death is a very commonly used topic in literature, TV, and movies today. The fear of death is evident in literature commonly read such as “The Pardoner’s Tale” and “The Masque of the Red Death”.

Death is a phenomenon that many do not understand in America. America tells many that life should be lived in a certain way in order to live life to its fullest before death comes creeping along. Humans create this false pursuit of happiness before they leave this world. It leaves many in fear of death. Religious beliefs teach humans to embrace death. If that is the case, then why is it that citizens in north America still fear death when living a happy life in a first world country. Jack Kerouac is inspired to write spontaneously through his travels in Mexico because of Tristessa’s junk addiction and how she embraces death even though her life is miserable. The romantic’s wrote many poems about death and many artists from that era embraced death because it evoked a high level of curiosity in humans. Kerouac seems to embrace this notion too because it expresses an essential truth about the human condition. He was inspired by a dove in Tristessa’s house, “Yet so much like Tristessa’s eyes that I wish I could comment and tell Tristessa: Thou hast the dove’s eyes.”(Kerouac 26) the Dove represents the communication between the two worlds and more importantly it represents peace of the deepest kind. It sooths all our worries and troubled thoughts. It helps to appreciate the little things in life. Kerouac wrote in spontaneous prose style at this moment in time because he was captivated by the image of the dove in Tristessa’s house looking over her

His handling of the theme is, on the contrary, strikingly abstract, which compounds the effect of their inherent abstraction (“Kelvin Everest”). “When I Have Fears That I May Have Ceased To Be” is an example of beauty, love and death as the theme (“Kevin Everest”). Keats uses this sonnet as a frame upon which is soliloquize, a shape upon which to string his thoughts about death, love, art, imagination, frame and writing all as a theme says another critic Bruce King (“Bruce King”). Keats wrote this poem about having fears dying before people could see his poetry work says Bruce King. When I have fears is a Shakespearean sonnet consisting of three quatrains, each of alternating new rhymes concluding a couplet. Such as a rhyme scheme of (abab, cdcd, efef) and the couplet (gg)( “Bruce King”). The poem consists of a lot of vowel sound rhymes throughout the poem says critic Bruce King. Throughout the quatrains of the poem the quatrains are marked by the semicolons after lines 4 and 8, by the repetition of “When I” at the start of the first and second quatrain, and by the repeated phrase “And when I” at the start of the third quatrain.(“Bruce King”) Critic Bruce King says the vowel rhyme “romance"/"chance” in the second quatrain has similarities to “brain"/"grain” in the first quatrain while the nasal “n” sounds are alike in the poem. Therefore, those are vowel rhymes he

In “To Autumn”, the season autumn is depicted as death, or as the Grim Reaper. Autumn is, however, an unusual reaper figure, in that they are not merciless, but patient and calm. Interestingly enough, the point of view Keats offers about death, is non-violent, not corporeal, and only implicit in the poem, through metaphors. Almost all human components are removed from the poem, and death is symbolized by nature only. It is put into a context where it occurs in the course of nature, and pictured as a consequence of riches, abundance, and fulfilment.