Poem of the Day: ‘When I Have Fears’

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 explicit endeavor of mediating that world through his writer’s intellect.As we’ve seen in his famous sonnet, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” which appeared as Poem of the Day on June 19, Keats appropriates Wordsworth’s notion of the “spot of time” to inscribe reading as one of those experiences of joy that continually return to refresh the mind. His concept of negative capability, too, which informs such poems as last year’s feature, “What the Thrush Said,” revises Wordsworth’s notion of the Sublime, articulating it as the poet’s particular way of knowing. Today’s Poem of the Day, “When I Have Fears,” imagines the universal human fear of death as a poet’s existential crisis. Keats, of course, suffering from tuberculosis and doomed to die at twenty-four, had every reason to fear that his time would run out before his inspiration did. We all have fears that we may cease to be. Indeed, we have that certainty, and on one level or another, we’re all afraid of it. We may tremble to contemplate that terrible day when we no longer look at the stars. In this Shakespearean sonnet, Keats entertains the poet’s particular fear of not writing about the stars. His first fear, naturally, is of ceasing to be a poet. But at the sonnet’s turn, in its ninth line, an even more elemental death-fear occurs to him: the prospect of eternal, anonymous loneliness on “the shore/ of the wide world,” the annihilation of every aspect of his human self, the utter cessation of being. When I Have Fearsby John KeatsWhen 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 shoreOf the wide world I stand alone, and thinkTill Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘When I Have Fears’

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