John Keats – Page 4 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of John Keats’s ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

John Keats wrote a number of sonnets in his short life, and ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ remains a popular and widely anthologised one. Some words of analysis are useful in highlighting the relevance of Keats’s imagery in this poem, as well as the form and language of the sonnet. The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg, which is particularly appropriate here, since in this poem Keats is preoccupied with dying prematurely, before he has had a chance to write his best work and take his place ‘among the English poets’ (as Keats himself put it).

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred 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 shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

A Short Analysis of John Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Being depressed from time to time is a fact of life. But should we deal with feeling down, a case of the blues, or – as John Keats calls it – ‘melancholy’? In his ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (written in 1819), the poet offers some advice on how to deal with a dose of the doldrums. In this post, we’re going to offer an analysis of ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and the language Keats uses in this poem.

A Short Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s ‘I died for Beauty, but was scarce’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘I died for Beauty – but was scarce’ – poem number 449 in Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems – is one of her most popular poems, but, like so much of her work, its meaning remains difficult to pin down and analyse. Nevertheless, here at Interesting Literature we like a challenge, and so below we offer a brief summary and analysis of ‘I died for Beauty’ – its enigmatic lyrical beauty, its unusual tableau, and its use of symbols.

A Short Analysis of Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

A summary and analysis of a classic John Keats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is a sonnet composed by Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) in October 1816, when he was just 20 years old. The poem focuses on Keats’s initial encounter with an English translation of Homer’s poetry by George Chapman (c. 1559-1634), likening the experience to that of an astronomer discovering a new planet or an explorer sighting an unknown land.

A Short Analysis of Keats’s ‘This Living Hand’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘This living hand, now warm and capable’ is an oddity amongst John Keats’s poetry – indeed, amongst Romantic poetry in general. Just eight lines long – or seven-and-a-half, even – it’s almost a fragment, written in blank verse, almost as if it’s a snippet of spoken dialogue from an unwritten play. (Fittingly, Keats wrote ‘This living hand’ on a manuscript page of one of his unfinished poems.)