When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be Analysis

This poem falls into two major thought groups: *Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12). *Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet. The first quatrain (four lines) emphasizes both how …

…feelings and ordinary life, so he is able to reach a resolution. He thinks about the human solitariness ("I stand alone") and human insignificance (the implicit contrast betwen his lone self and "the wide world"). The shore is a point of contact, the threshold between two worlds or conditions, land and sea; so Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn.