When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be | John Keats | Poetry Music Video (The POETRY Series)

Poetry music video for "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be" by John Keats — a cinematic film, not just a reading. Original music, visual storytelling, and one of the most intimate and most devastating sonnets in the English language given the form it deserves."When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain." This is a poetry music video — a cinematic film, not a reading. Part of The POETRY Series — great poems given the visual and sonic world they deserve. The poem is fourteen lines. Keats wrote it at twenty-two. He was already coughing blood. He died at twenty-five. About the poem: The sonnet is a single, unbroken sentence — three quatrains and a closing couplet, structured in the Shakespearean form Keats used with more natural ease than almost any poet since Shakespeare himself. It opens with fear: the fear of dying before his pen has gleaned everything ripening in his mind, before he has traced the night sky's starry face, before he has held the magic hand of chance and felt unreflecting love. Each quatrain deepens the fear. The first is about his work — all the books unwritten, the harvest of his teeming brain that might never be gathered. The second is about the world's beauty — the night sky, the romance in the cloudy symbols at the horizon, the sense that there is more to understand than he will have time to understand. The third is about love — unreflecting, faery — the kind that does not know itself until it is gone. And then the closing couplet does something no consolation could do: it dissolves. He stands on the shore of the wide world. He thinks. And love and fame sink to nothingness. Not despair — something quieter and more complete. The fear, having been fully looked at, becomes small. The world is wide. He is brief within it. That is simply true. What makes this sonnet almost unbearable is that Keats was right to be afraid. He did cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. He died in Rome in February 1821, at twenty-five, of tuberculosis — the same disease that would take Jacobsen, Flecker, and Shelley's closest circle. He asked that his gravestone carry no name, only the words: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. He was wrong about that. His name has lasted two hundred years. But the fears were real, and the poem is the record of a young man feeling them with complete honesty, in fourteen lines, before the night came in. About the poet: John Keats (1795–1821) is one of the principal figures of the English Romantic movement and among the most beloved poets in the English language. He published three collections in five years. He was savaged by critics. He died at twenty-five. Within twenty years of his death he was recognised as one of the greatest poets England had ever produced. He is the poet James Elroy Flecker was compared to at his death. He is the poet Shelley mourned in Adonais. He is the shadow that falls across half the young poets in this series. This is the first Keats film in The POETRY Series. It will not be the last. #johnkeats #keats #poetry #poetrymusicvideo #thepoetryseries #cinematicpoetry #spokenword #romanticpoetry #poetryfilm #sonnet #keatspoetrry #poetrycommunity #poetrylovers #mortalitypoetry #whenihavefears (Subscribe for The POETRY Series — cinematic poetry music videos for great poems. Not readings. Films.) read by Tom O'Bedlam Song: Heroe - Loophole Wikipedia: John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Like, share & subscribe for more :) - Big Thanks to my Patrons: Douglas Cal Tommy Austin Charles S. Thomas Uncle Chan Carling M. J.B. - Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/morphingreality Books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074YF3ZS9 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1728768993 Minds: https://www.minds.com/MorphingReality Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/morphingreality Twitter: https://twitter.com/MorphingReality - Original: When I have Fears That I May Cease To Be by John Keats (read by Tom O'Bedlam) Footage: Will (2017) Nostalgia - Nostalghia - Andrei Tarkovsky (1983) Before Sunrise - Richard Linklater (1995) Mirror - Зеркало - Zerkalo - Andrei Tarkovsky (1975) #Art #Poetry #JohnKeats When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be