When I have fears that I may cease to be
In his English sonnet “When I Have Fears” (pg. ... I believe that Keats wrote this poem to describe the natural order of emotions he went through while thinking of his own mortality. ... The first line, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (pg. ... The fact that he says, “When I have fears…” leads me to believe that these fears are not an everyday experience, but a common occurrence that bothers him from time to time. It is also in this quatrain that Keats uses agricultural metaphors to describe his fears of death. ... When Keats describes his “teeming brain,” one can imagine millions of thoughts and fears running rampant throughout his mind, leaving him in a state of utter confusion. This entire second line is intended to tell us that by writing this sonnet, Keats is “raking” or sorting all of the fears that have cluttered his mind. ... In this particular case I believe Keats used grain as a metaphor for human life. ... The fifth line reads, “When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,” (pg. ... As the quatrain continues, he begins to express the notion that there may be many things that he won’t be able to do in his lifetime as shown in the seventh and eighth lines: “And think that I may never live to trace…Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;” (pg.