Poem Analysis: When I Have That I may Cease To Be _ John Keats

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.

This poem speaks about the writers desperate desire for serious fame, success and love. With that said, the poet does not just want any old love and fame, he wants earth-shaking, one-in-a-lifetime kind of love and hectic fame, however, in the last two lines talks about the unimportance of love and fame in attempt to resolve his fears. His fears being dying before he becomes successful and famous. The poem discusses both the poets desires and despairs. This poem is an Elizabethan sonnet, structured by three quatrains,ending with a rhyming couplet.   

The first stanza brings us to the attention and emphasizes his moist imagination and how much he has to offer, hence making reference to a harvest  ( ie. glean'd; garners & ripened grain) ; he emphasizes this through the use of alliteration and assonance (line 4). A harvest matures with time, which results in a valued product, as reflected in the grain being fully ripened. The "harvest" is shown in adjectives like "high-piled" and "rich". The harvest that is being spoken of, is a paradoxical metaphor - The poet is both the field of grain (his imagination and ideas are to be harvested like the grain) and he is the harvester (the writer of poetry)

The poet sees the world as potential to transform into poetry. The potential lies in the beauty of nature and the larger meanings he perceives under the appearance of nature.

The poet then moves onto love as the fair creature of an hour. There is also an idea that love is short-lived. The quatrain itself parallels the idea of little time, in being only three and a half lines, rather than the standard four lines of a Elizabethan sonnet; the effect  of this shortening is of a slight speeding-up of time, making us question the importance of love to the poet in comparison to poetry.  

We know that the poet is concerned with time by the repetition of  "when" in each quatrain