John Keats' When I Have Fears as a representation of his balance of creative manifestation
...re (his) pen has gleaned (his) teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;” Clearly Keats is stating that he is afraid to die before he can write and publish all of the poetic ideas in his head. Grain goes to waste if a farmer can not harvest it before the winter comes, much like Keats ideas will go to waste if he can not manifest them before his death. The metaphor is also significant, however, because it represents one school of thought about writing poetry. The grain metaphor assumes that all of the ideas for Keats’ poems are inside his head, and that writing poetry is just the art of getting that “grain” out of your brain and onto paper. This suggests that writing poetry be based not on inspiration, but on perspiration. The second metaphor is of Keats tracing shadows, “with the magic hand of chance.” He still is expressing his passion for poetry, but now he introduces an entirely different method to creative writing. In this quatrain he refers to poetic ideas as, “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,” and fears that he will not live long enough to “trace their shadows.” This metaphor suggests that ideas are not “gleaned” out of teeming brains, but instead are pulled out of the “nights stared face”, and at the will of random inspiration. Keats uses night as a metaphor for potentiality to construct a poem, but the night does not belong to the poet. This theory negates the notion that the ideas for poems reside in the poet’s mind, and promotes the belief that the author has no control over his inspired creations. The two methods that Keats describes through metaphor contradict each other, yet Keats talks about them together as one of the few things he feels are worth living for. One of the techniques suggests tireless work, while the other suggests merely the tracing of ideas beyond the author. Clearly gleaning is more laborious than tracing. In addition, one method implies that ideas come from the author’s brain, while the other insists that he/she stumble across them by chance. Keats cites these two radically different ideas as one to show that a poet needs to actively use both methods for creative and artistic balance. If a poet only wrote when...