John Keats When I Have Fears

Death was introduced to Keats at an early age after the loss of his father, mother, and then eventually his brother Tom. Experiences were a major influence in the creation of his philosophy and concept of life, death, and mortality. Although it happens to be one of Keats’s shorter poems, “When I Have Fears” from 1818 has the most depth compared to others regarding his fear of death. Knowing the veracity that death could take his existence away, he meditated on how he may never “relish in the fairy power of reflecting love—then on the shore” and how he could pass “before high-piled books, in charactery, hold like rich garners the full ripened grain” (Text L. 11-12 & 3-4). All of these fears in the poem that derive from death would be correct when comparing it to that of his own life. Keats himself

While his heart is in pain for man “where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”, his happiness is abundant knowing that “thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” (Text L. 26 & 61). While knowledge leads to the understanding of life and death, it does not result in happiness. Keats searched for an answer to complete his philosophy on the mysteries of death but also realized that because “man knows that he is born to die, knows ‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret’ of the world of mortality” which “overshadows man's life and all his songs” (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, The Ode to a Nightingale, 47). The nightingale lives in harmony with his world yet man is in competition with his. Keats makes the sense in which the nightingale is immortal, yet man is not, more understandable for the reader. Man knows that as time steals the youth of humans, they get closer and closer to death and because of this knowledge they cannot experience life as beautifully as the bird does. Rather than dreading the surcease of death he expresses that “now more than ever seems it rich to die” (Text L. 55). Man cannot experience the feelings death evokes after he himself