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.
Did you like this poem? Why not receive free classic poems by email? SUBSCRIBE
More Poems by John Keats
• Bright Star
• Give Me Women, Wine, And Snuff
• La Belle Dame Sans Merci
• Ode
• Ode On A Grecian Urn
• Ode On Melancholy
• Ode To A Nightingale
• Ode To Autumn
• Ode To Psyche
• On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer
• On The Grasshopper And Cricket
• Robin Hood
• Sonnet: On The Sonnet
• The Human Seasons
• To Mrs. Reynolds's Cat
• To Sleep
• When I Have Fears
• Where Be Ye Going, You Devon Maid?
• Where's The Poet?
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Frost
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth
Keats When I Have Fears - Poem Lyrics - John Keats - When I Have Fears

