Fear Of Death Essay

Death is inevitable. Chidiock Tichborne and John Keats in their poems “Tichborne’s Elegy” and “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 “Tichborne’s Elegy”

John Keats explores his fear of death in “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, “Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain…” (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 connected to the first. The second

The last lines end with periods, but a refrain sums up Tichborne’s awareness of his death, and nostalgia towards life. In Helen Vendler’s work “The Poem as Life, the Poems as Arranged Life,” she suggests that the repetition of the refrain serves the purpose of reinforcing the idea of what has happened, or in Tichborne’s case what is happening (48). As shown in the epigraph of the poem, Tichborne had “written [the poem] with his own hand in the Tower before his execution.” His situation caused him to have an immediate understanding of his mortality, forcing him to reflect on his life with a bitterness, that is reinforced by the refrain. He uses the conjunctions “but” and “and” in every line of his poem to show how his life was, and how it is now. Tichborne switches from the past and present in every one of his lines, in a way that the first four words of each line begin with a positive statement and then he polarizes it. In the first stanza, he realizes the great moments of his life were actually small, and what he once considered significant is actually insignificant. In his reflection about his life, he realizes how wretched it all was, when he says for example, “My feast of joy is but a dish of pain” (2). Where what was once a “feast” is now a “dish,” moreover, in the line after he continues, “My crop of corn is but a field of tares” (3).