Angel Garay Estefes
Professor Dayna Castle
2333
3 February 2016
A Comparison between Two Sonnets
In “Mezzo Cammin”, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and in “When I Have Fears”, by John Keats, the two poems express, through metaphors and symbolism, how each of them feel about the limited time that they have left and both of the authors take death as something that is inevitable. However, Keats has an overall attitude of negativity and hopelessness over the thought of him dying too soon while Longfellow expresses a positive attitude which shows that he is willing to do his best until his death.
Keats poem “When I have Fears” is a Shakespearean sonnet. In the first two stanzas of the poem Keats expresses his love of poetry and how he fears that his death will come before he can write and publish all of the poems that he can. He also uses two different metaphors in the first two quatrains to express his love of poetry and the two metaphors shows two methods to form creative writing. The first metaphor that Keats uses is in the first quatrain when he writes, “Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, / Before high-piled books, in character, / Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;”(lines 2-4) It is clear that Keats is expressing that he is afraid of dying before publish all of the poetry that are inside of his head, but he also
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In the first octave, Longfellow explains his regret of letting love get in the way of “fulfilling his aspiration”. He describes his ignorance as him letting love almost getting him “killed” (7). In line 6, Longfellow writes “Of restless passions that couldn’t be stilled” to represent how love struck he was. This love struck that he had gained had caused him to not be able to fulfill what he would have been able to and he expresses this in line 8 when he writes, “Kept me from what I may accomplish