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John Keats When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

551 Words3 Pages

From the beginning, children are taught to fear the concept of death. Most people spend their lives fearing death, but it’s not death that they are afraid of. It is part of nature to die, and our minds know that, what scares most people is the thought of death before they have had time to accomplish what they want in life. In “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” John Keats put into words how people feel about dying before they have been successful in whatever mission they have set forth for themselves. His poem touches the reality of people’s feelings though imagery and figurative language. Keats doesn’t waste a moment when it comes to introducing his fear to the reader. His first line opens with a deliberate contemplation of death. It immediately throws the reader into a place of vulnerability by playing on their fears. This opens the reader to the poem on a personal level, allowing them to connect to Keats’ views on dying. He then follows it with metaphors of love and images of and unsuccessful life. …show more content…

Starting at line 5 and going to line 8, Keats imagines love as something written on the night sky. He starts by personifying the sky, in line 5 he says “..the night’s starred face,” which allows him to connect the sky to a person or in this case a human emotion. He brings the emotion of love and the concept of romance into his poem in line 6, “..symbols of high romance,” and in the following two lines he shows how unreachable love is if death is to come to him sooner rather than later. By placing the love he, and everybody else, longs for in the night sky, and vast and mysterious place, he makes the journey to finding love a long hard one. A journey that could never be fully accomplished if death was to come too

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