John Keats wrote the sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.”
Keats composed the poem between January 22 and January 31, 1818, when he was 22 years old. In its 14 lines, he fears dying before completing the poems he imagines within his mind, before fully experiencing nature, and before finding lasting love. The sonnet therefore connects mortality with unrealized artistic and emotional potential.
The poem follows the structure of an English, or Shakespearean, sonnet: three quatrains followed by a closing couplet. Its rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and it is written largely in iambic pentameter. The final couplet turns inward, imagining the speaker standing alone beside the shore of the world until love and fame disappear.
A common misunderstanding is that the poem was written immediately before Keats’s death from tuberculosis. It was written several years earlier, although his medical training and awareness of illness shaped his sensitivity to death. Keats died in Rome in 1821 at age 25, and the sonnet was published posthumously in 1848.