<P> "When I Have Fears" is an Elizabethan sonnet by the English Romantic poet John Keats . The 14 - line poem is written in iambic pentameter and consists of three quatrains and a couplet . Keats wrote the poem between January 22 and 31, 1818 . It was published (posthumously) in 1848 in Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats by Richard Monckton Milnes . </P> <P> When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high - piled books, in charact'ry, 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. - </P>

When was when i have fears that i may cease to be written