The speakers in John Keats’ “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” are both fixated on the prospect of death, yet view it in completely opposite ways. In “When I Have Fears,” death is the spectral absence of a future, whereas life is seen through the imagery of the harvest. The poem’s form—a Shakespearean sonnet—conveys Keats’ belief in the unattainability of potential fame and love. “Lady Lazarus,” on the other hand, utilizes much darker imagery, comparing life to the horrors of a concentration camp, and death to a state of protection and peace. Unlike Keats’ poem, Plath’s is structured in tercets, a form that evokes the chaos and torture depicted in Dante’s Inferno. Both poets describe what they fear as a negative space; for Keats, this negative is death, while for Plath, this negative is life.
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