Keats’ Fear and Tichborne’s Acceptance: Death Essay -- Poetry Analysis

Death is inevitable. Chidiock Tichborne and John Keats in their poems â€Å"Tichborne’s Elegy† and â€Å"When I have fears that I may cease to be† convey death in opposite ways. Tichborne through his poetic style, shows an acceptance of his death, as a result of reflecting on a life fulfilled, but unrecognized. While Keats, expresses a fear of death, where he contemplates that he will not be able to experience love or fame. Both these poets have lead lives that varied from each other in ways that are most revealed through their use of form, metaphors, repetition, punctuation and rhyme schemes. Moreover, both poets express and explore deep rooted human emotions such as, nostalgia, pain, love and a feeling of insatiability. Although â€Å"Tichborne’s Elegy† and â€Å"When I have fears that I may cease to be† share a common theme because each speaker contemplates the inevitability of his death, their perceptions differ mainly as a result of thei r circumstances. John Keats explores his fear of death in â€Å"When I have fears that I may cease to be† in the form of a Shakespearean Sonnet. The poem contains three quatrains that interlock his primary fears together, leading to a couplet that expresses his remedy and final thoughts. His primary fears are expressed with respect to the abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean Sonnet, with each fear contained in each rhyming quatrain. His first fear, in the first quatrain is dying without living up to his full potential as a writer, when he states, â€Å"Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (2). This line indicates that he has not expressed through his pen, all that is on his mind, and leads into the second quatrain with the use of a semicolon which suggests that the next part of the poem is connecte... ...eats as well, when he refers to â€Å"†¦the shore of the wide world†¦Ã¢â‚¬  it symbolizes the world of his experiences, which he ponders on. It is only by deeper inspection of these symbols can a clear idea of what the poets are expressing be understood. By comparing both these poems, it is evident that although death is the focus of both these poems, Tichborne has accepted it, while Keats fears it, but has found a way to resolve his fears. Works Cited " Hatzitsinidou , Evangelia . "Fates(Moirae)-the spinners of the thread of life." Greek-Gods.Info- Greek Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2010. . Vendler, Helen. "The Poem as Life, The Poems as Arranged Life." Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. Third Edition ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009. 18,68. Print.