When I was reading John Keats's sonnet "When I have fears that I may cease to be" the moral of this work really hit home with me. I feel that Keats is reflecting on his fear of an early death (or just his death in general), and he is scared of losing what is most dear to him (writing poetry). He feels that he may die before ever being able to fulfill his full potential as a poet or before being able to write everything that he was meant to write. He expresses his potential when he says "And I think that I may never live to trace/Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance". He fears that he will not be able to use "the magic hand of chance" to "trace the cloudy symbols of high romance on a starry night"; which means that he cannot not store the results of this act as poems in books (of which he feels that his poems are as plentiful as fully ripened grain stored after a particularly bountiful harvest). When he says: "And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,/ That I shall never look upon thee more", he is saying that he is afraid that once he dies he can never experience the magic of writing again. And if this happens then he is alone in the world: "...then on the shore/Of the wide world I stand alone...", and his "love" and "fame" will sink into nothingness and cease to exist (writing is everything that he loves and treasures and without it nothing else could exist for him).
The reason that this hit home for me is because I feel that everyone experiences these moments in their life when they think about losing all that is precious to them. It is hard to express in words the painful emotions that one has with these feelings because it feels like if you somehow lost everything precious to you that nothing is worth living for in the first place. I feel like Keats does a terrific job of summarizing this feeling (through his personal feelings) in a sonnet.
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