When I have fears: Synopsis and Commentary

The speaker expresses his fears that he will die before he has had an opportunity to accomplish his work. He has so much he wants to write and possibly little time to put his thoughts on paper. 

 

The speaker is extremely sensitive to beauty, whether manifested in the stars or in a woman seen by chance. The thought that he may die young and never be able to experience again either beauty or love makes him feel desolate, contemplating ‘nothingness’, the certainty of annihilation and with it the elimination of his fears.

This poem was written between 22 and 28 January 1818.

 

Richard Woodhouse, the lawyer who gave literary and legal advice to Keats’ publishers, Taylor and Hessey, often discussed Keats’ poems with the poet. He noted that the phrases, ‘And think that I may never live to trace / Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance’:

 

glean’d: gathered the products of (literally collected all the corn in a harvest)

teeming: full of, or swarming with ideas

charactery: letters of the alphabet (a word first used by Shakespeare)

garners: archaic tern for granary

fair creature of an hour: a beautiful woman whom Keats had seen only fleetingly. Woodhouse stated that Keats was thinking of the same woman he had seen in the summer of 1814 at Vauxhall Gardens (see Time’s sea). He is not referring to Fanny Brawne, whom he met later in the same year he wrote this poem.