"When I Have Fears" is an Elizabethan sonnet by the English Romantic poet John Keats and is a very personal confession of an emotion that intruded itself into the fabric of Keats' existence from at least 1816 on, the fear of an early death. The fact that both his parents were short-lived may account for the presence of this disturbing fear. This poem was written in 1818, only a few short years before Keats’ own death. It is primarily a poem about Keats’ fear of mortality, however in true Keatsian fashion, death is also the solution for more of what ails Keats. It would be prudent to remember that Keats’ poems have all, in some way, featured death; death of nature, death of love, death of memory, but death all in all. There are few poems, in fact, that does not reference the ending of things. This poem is effusive with imagery, sensual in its description of the fears that Keats possesses, and short. Keats runs the gamut from worrying about dying before he is famous, worrying about the death of his beloved, and then deciding that death itself is not such a terrible situation. Keats’ first worry is this: what if I should die before I have written to the best of my ability? It is not merely death, therefore, that worries Keats, but death in infamy – ironic, as he is now one of the most renowned names of English poetry. In fact, Keats was so sure that he would die without creating a ripple in the world of English poetry that his tombstone was made out to the one ‘whose name was writ in water’, thus showing the transience of Keats’ fame. He also feared that he would not be able to achieve his full capacity in terms of writing. He feared the limitations of his life. The use of fertility words – ‘gleaned, ‘garners’, ‘full ripen’d grain’ – subtly reinforces the idea of the artist’s creation and his mind as a fertile landscape. Keats views his imagination as a field of grain, wherein he is both the man harvesting, and the product is harvested.