Wow! I was blown away by this poem. I've never really dived into Keats and this poem is suddenly one of the most endlessly relevant poems I've ever read. What's weird is I was browsing movies on Netflix and I happen to click on Equilibrium because it looked interesting. In the movie people could not feel emotions or the government would seek and destroy them. Everybody was taking a certain drug that made people emotionless. It was wild but needless to say there was a moment when a guy was killed for reading Keats. The relevancy I was speaking of is due to my own thoughts and what I imagine others that are lucky enough and privileged enough to ponder these thoughts. Maslow's hierarchy comes to mind in regards to being lucky and privileged. I probably live better (in terms of quality of life) than roughly 6 billion people on the planet and that's not even considering the generations of people before me. It is humbling to think how lucky we are to be able to consider these notions. But, to think I want more. Fortune, Love, Fame, and to maximize my talents to stretch to their farthest lengths. The fears of the privileged are still fears. Is it to much to ask to seek more. I think it is human to want more. To be the greatest you can imagine and to go even further than that. It is what drives the entire race of mankind. To go further and to want to go further as if the farthest point is just what we imagine it to be.
I also enjoyed the form and rhyme pattern. I think writing in form and or rhyme is to writing free form is as playing basketball in a league with referees is to playing a pick up game in the park.
Keats is certainly taking up the ideas of Fame and Love (which he capitalizes to personify in the last line) and that human desire for immortality, to live beyond the physical frame of the body through a legacy of art. This is the topic of many of his most famous poems--but in this sonnet he doesn't stay with these themes. His litany of fears produces a condition: "and then on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink" (12-14). Several questions are provoked by these final lines: what is the "wide shore" of the world? Where has the speaker positioned himself? Why does Keats put emphasis here on solitude and thought? What is it about this combination of situation and reflection that negates all the desires you bring up in your post?
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