when i have fears -- keats

jakjak

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd 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.

keats told us everything about himself

怀抱花朵的孩子

I've just found some interesting comments on this poem here and I'd like to paste the most interesting one:

John Keats composed this poem on January 31, in1818, it is one of his the most beautiful sonnets. He in this poem describes the insignificance of love, fame and other ideals. He fears before death that he will die prior to the realisation of the motive behind his poetry. He will no more see the face of his beloved. Love and fame appear to him vain and every worldly thing loses its charm. John Keats, the poet in this beautiful sonnet anticipates his death and apprehends different fears. He might have written this sonnet anticipating that he might die at any moment as he died of consumption at the early age of twenty-six when he had sublime and dignified ideals in front of him to be achieved. That is why he fears that he might die before the realisation of his ideals. His apprehension of death may have deprived him of the joy of looking at his beloved’s charming face. When death encroaches quite near, he realises the nothingness of love and fame. No doubt death is the time of sleep but it awakens the poet and he is revealed that fame, love and wealth which had been the centre of his activities in fact are nothing and nothing will sink into nothingness. He feels repentance that he neglected death which is the ultimate reality.
One must keep in his mind that the poet is not merely afraid of death, but his is afraid of death before the expression of his teeming brain, he is afraid because he finds himself standing on the shore of the world all alone, unaccompanied, without love and fame. Death without any achievement makes him worried, he knows that sooner or later he has to crease but before his death he wants to capture the beauties of night starred face, and huge floating clouds of sublime romantic thoughts. He finds the whole universe in front of him as a field of full-ripened grain; he is merely afraid of death before collecting and gathering the harvest and saving it in the bins to be relished by the coming generation. The poet is willing to die; he prefers death to life where love is unreflecting, he only loves objects of permanence. He is revealed while standing alone on the shore of the world that love and fame which are pursued blindly by Man or in fact to sink into the ocean of nothingness. The poet is of the opinion that permanence can only be achieved in the form of gleaning sublime romantic thoughts, creating things of beauty, pouring out the teeming brain. Keats' poetry was mainly concerned with beauty, love, romance and fame. This sonnet contains all these elements. All his life he cherished in his mind the idea of beauty, according to him “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Despite praising and enjoying beauty he led a dejected and melancholy life. He feared that he might miss the beauty of his thoughts, of romantic ideas, in case death approaches him untimely. He demands a span of time enough to harvest and collect the scattered grain of poetic lofty ideals and then wishes to die in contentment after fulfilment of his mission.

怀抱花朵的孩子

The comment I've just post above is interesting but not very specialized, here is a more serious one:

Overview
     Written in 1818, this poem expresses concerns that run through his poetry and his letters--fame, love, and time. Keats was conscious of needing time to write his poetry; when twenty-one, he wrote,

Oh, for ten years that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy.
By age twenty-four--only three years later, he had essentially stopped writing because of ill health. There were times he felt confident that his poetry would survive him, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death." Nevertheless, the inscription he wrote for his headstone was, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Definitions and Allusions
Line 2. glean: in this poem, Keats is using the meaning of collecting patiently or picking out laboriously.
          teeming: plentiful, overflowing, or produced in large quantities.
Line 3. charactery: printing or handwriting.

Line 4. garners: granaries or storehouses for grain.

Line 6. high romance: high = of an elevated or exalted character or quality; romance = medieval narrative of chivalry, also an idealistic fiction which tends not to be realistic.

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 fertile his imagination is and how much he has to express; hence the imagery of the harvest, e.g., "glean'd," "garners," "full ripen'd grain." Subtly reinforcing this idea is the alliteration of the key words "glean'd," garners," and "grain," as well as the repetition of r sounds in "charactery," "rich," "garners,"ripen'd," and "grain.". A harvest is, obviously, fulfillment in time, the culmination which yields a valued product, as reflected in the grain being "full ripen'd." Abundance is also apparent in the adjectives "high-piled" and "rich." The harvest metaphor contains a paradox (paradox is a characteristic of Keats's poetry and thought): Keats is both the field of grain (his imagination is like the grain to be harvested) and he is the harvester (writer of poetry).

     In the next quatrain (lines 5-8), he sees the world as full of material he could transform into poetry (his is "the magic hand")--the beauty of nature ("night's starr'd face) and the larger meanings he perceives beneath the appearance of nature or physical phenomena ("Huge cloudy symbols") .

     In the third quatrain (lines 9-12), he turns to love. As the "fair creature of an hour," his beloved is short-lived just as, by implication, love is. The quatrain itself parallels the idea of little time, in being only three and a half lines, rather than the usual four lines of a Shakespearean sonnet; the effect in reading is of a slight speeding-up of time. Is love as important as, less important than, or equally important as poetry for Keats in this poem? Does the fact that he devotes fewer lines to love than to poetry suggest anything about their relative importance to him?

     The poet's concern with time (not enough time to fulfill his poetic gift and love) is supported by the repetition of "when" at the beginning of each quatrain and by the shortening of the third quatrain. Keats attributes two qualities to love: (1) it has the ability to transform the world for the lovers ("faery power"), but of course fairies are not real, and their enchantments are an illusion and (2) love involves us with emotion rather than thought ("I feel" and "unreflecting love").

     Reflecting upon his feelings, which the act of writing this sonnet has involved, Keats achieves some distancing from his own 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.

From: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/fear.html

[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-6-17 23:07 编辑 ]

jakjak

know the painter david freidrich?
go and find his works
in my understanding, he was keats' brother in art