"When I have fears that I may cease to be" John Keats.

Death, an enormous word, a cruel meaning that provokes us fears because of our own end of life as well as our loved one’s death. Probably most of us think about death once a while, wondering what happens after death in order to find any convincing answer to this question that no philosopher, scientist or religious can answers us.

Keats poem “When I have fears that I may cease to be” perhaps shows us the immensity of death which leaves a person standing isolated and alone metaphorically on "the shore of the wide world”. Furthermore, this poem represents the worst fears that a young person has while thinking about his or her early decease. In my own case I have the same feelings that Keats captured in his poem, such as: “not having enough time to love another fully, or write till the point where his pen glean'd his teeming brain, or reaching the level of fame he has always desired”, to me those words represent all my horrible feelings when thinking about death, although those last lines of the poem are beautiful well written.

As I mentioned before through this poem we can figure it out that the author knew that he will die being a young man because of his disease, and what hurts him the most is not being able to write his poems which will lead him to fame, and the loss of his beloved one.

To conclude, I believe that it is important to see in this poem how Keats uses a sonnet to discuss human fears about death through his own different fears of death.

"Kubla Khan". Poem written by Samuel Coloridge.

“Poetry is an art…of representing, in words, external nature and human thoughts and affections, both relatively to human affections, by the production of as much immediate pleasure in parts, as is compatible with the largest sum of pleasure in the whole”.

I strongly believe that in order to conceive the meaning of the story behind Coleridge’s poem called Kubla Khan, it is necessary to understand the circumstances and language techniques in which was written in, because in my opinion it seems that the poem was written by someone with mental disease.

I still remember that during one of our classes we talked about the importance that poetry takes in our lives. In the case of Kubla Khan poem I believe that the author wrote it as a way to express his medical condition. It is known that Coloridge took opium as antibiotic which helped him with his health issues. Probably, that is the reason why the poem seems so strange at times. But as the above quotation mentions; poetry is an art of representing human thoughts in this case Coloridge thoughts.

One topic of the poem that Coloridge points out is the nature of poetic inspiration. According to my own experience while reading the poem, I felt that Coleridge made use of the experience of being possessed by a daemon or guiding spirit in which the poet can’t control the daemon and what the daemon only wants it is to try to take advantage of it when it comes. To me this poem shows us in a paradoxically way the voices and the frustration of a poet whose daemon has dead.

To conclude, whether the poem displays or only simulates wild inspiration, whether the poet is out of his mind or fully in control, “Kubla Khan” is a magical poem full of human representations of feelings, thoughts and nature in order to illustrate the power of imagination to represent fragments of his own life.

"The little Black Boy" Poem written by William Blake.

“Pretty Baa lams” by Ford Madox Brown (1851-1859)

At a first glance in this poem Blake showed that human beings are ultimately the same despite the fact that we can have some physical differences. Through the innocence of a “little black boy” readers are able to see his desire of being accepted by a white English child. Although, we can see that this black boy felt different being a black person, I don’t see racial self-hatred in the poem. What I see is a confident guarantee that in God’s eyes everybody is “equal”.

In Blake's poem it is very clear and well represented an affectionate relationship between the mother and the little black boy. Through this representation the mother is very connected with God’s words and represented the figure of God on earth, due to she explained to her child that they will be vindicated in heaven where they will get closer to Jesus.

The painting “Pretty Baa lams” by Ford Madox Brown (1851-1859) made me feel closely connected to this poem, because its natural space and the way in which the mother holds in her hands the little boy depicts an interesting comparison within the poem. As example, the lambs and the grass field to me are connected with the idea of a symbolic God place in which eternity and heaven are represented through nature.