Abstract

While emphasizing that the fears and conflicts expressed in “When I Have Fears” are in fact inseparable from the traumatic experiences Keats went through in his childhood and early adulthood, this article explains how they are experienced in the poem as conflicts with the transitory nature of time. Keats believes in his great potential but has fears that a premature death would not grant him the time to bring it to fruition. From this perspective, the article extends Samuel Cross’s recent argument that Keats’s Endymion displays poetic desires of “earliness” and “lateness” (Cross, 2011) to demonstrate similar desires operating in “When I Have Fears.” For Keats, driven by an acute consciousness of time, forwards the temporal process of his poetic development to peer into the future he desires or wistfully lingers on those past or present vital moments curtailed by fleeting time. Furthermore, the article argues that the multivalent ending of the poem is of a piece with Keats’s concept of negative capability in that it accepts the finality of death without resolving the conflict between life and death or sublimating his fears into some higher reality or an immortal afterlife. The article concludes by pointing out the irony that while the poem expresses Keats’s fears that an early death would not give him the chance to achieve maturity as a poet, fear of death itself may be regarded as one of the driving forces behind his fast maturity and remarkable achievement. This astonishing achievement becomes all the more awe-inspiring in view of the brief life Keats was granted. Thus, rather than limiting his chance for fame, Keats’s premature death has kept his memory alive and won him the fame he pined for.

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