Today’s Poem: When I Have Fears

John Keats’s existential anxiety

The grave of John Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (Wikimedia Commons)

Of the English Romantics, it’s John Keats (1795–1821) who strikes us as that mythical creature, the “poet’s poet.” It’s Keats whose preoccupation is not only with human experience as part of a whole web of creation, ebbing and flowing in response to the world around it, but with the particular endeavor of mediating that world through his writer’s intellect. He had a finely tuned sense of that intellect as individual, even as it belonged to a larger tradition, peopled chiefly by Spenser, Shakespeare,  and Milton, as well as Wordsworth, his immediate elder.

This heightened sense of literary individuality disposed the poet to worry that the very voices he loved as influences — most of all Milton’s — would overtake his own work and smother it. Milton’s gigantic stature, the grandeur and sublimity of his vision, made the “precursor poet,” for the young Romantic, a model to imitate (as, most famously, in his Hyperion). But later, as the mid-20th-century critic John D. Rosenberg notes,  Keats would correct his admiration for Milton’s extreme contrasts of light and darkness, asserting that in these extremes Milton lacked the “feeling for light and shade” that poetry — his own, especially — aims to embody. In Keats’s adjustments of position around Milton, the light of that sublime sun becomes less an illumination than an obliteration of what the later poet understood as necessary shadows. 

John Keats by William Hilton, 1822 (Wikimedia Commons)

We might, then, read today’s poem, “When I Have Fears,” through a bifocal lens of existential anxiety. Keats, suffering from tuberculosis, doomed to die at twenty-four, had every reason to fear that his time would run out before his inspiration did. But what he feared was more complex than that. In this Shakespearean sonnet, Keats begins by turning the universal human anxiety about death up a notch. The dread day, as he envisions it, is not the day when he no longer sees the stars but when, as he specifies  in lines 5 and 6, having seen the night sky’s “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,” he will fail “to trace / their shadows.” What he fears, as the sonnet moves through its first two quatrains, is not simply failing to write what has been given him to write, but to think and write as himself, the interpreter of what he called “negative capability.” In his letters, wrangling with Milton’s influence, Keats concludes, as Rosenberg puts it, that “life for Milton would be stylistic and imaginative death for him.” In the “fears” of this sonnet, we might discern the shadow of the fear of artistic failure, a more urgent, immediate kind of non-being that adds its extra layer to the terrible idea of “nothingness.”

At the sonnet’s turn in line 9, however, something else presents itself for consideration as a loss: that “unreflecting” human love, extra-literary, presenting no danger of influence, a relation that doesn’t need parsing or demand individuation. The conjunction on which this turn occurs is not a but, but an and — not a more real death to supplant artistic death, but physical death and separation as an extension of that feared non-being-in-life. In the end, imaginatively stripped of his art, the poet confronts himself as a human being like any other, whose most essential fear, after all, like everyone else’s, is eternal loneliness on “the shore/ of the wide world.” 

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When I Have Fears

by John Keats

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.

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