Keats' "When I Have Fears"

Last month I read John Keats' "When I Have Fears" in one of my literary anthologies.  Apparently I'd noticed the structure of the poem before (in the anthology in which I read it during college, I drew lines to separate the sections), but reading it recently, I noticed that Keats doesn't strictly follow the common sonnet structure.

He uses the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet (with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg), and he also starts each quatrain with "when" (or "and when" for the third), which enforces that division (I've added line breaks to further emphasize it):

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-ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starred 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 fairy 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.

[In referencing this sonnet in two different anthologies, I've discovered that the punctuation doesn't match, so your experience may vary.]

Between the rhyme scheme and that leading "when" (plus the semi-colons), Keats makes that structure fairly obvious, but then he doesn't follow through with it.  There's a break in the twelfth line:  "Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore."  In a way, that third quatrain has a premature end, and the last couplet begins early.  In college, I even made a note of this:  the "then" completes the idea that's started with the various "when"s.  When [this], [this], and [this], then [this].

But the thing that I realized when I read the poem recently is that not holding to the structure there mirrors what the speaker is saying.  There's the interruption in life that the speaker mentioned (that is, death), and that "then" coming in half a line too soon is an interruption in the sonnet structure.

Names in Library of Souls

Last month, I read Ransom Rigg's Library of Souls, and I started to think about some of the characters' names.  The main character is named Jacob, and in the first book of the series - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - he learns that he has the same peculiar power that his grandfather Abraham had.  In Library of Souls, as he becomes more familiar and more adept with his power, there are a few instances where he's compared to his grandfather and his peculiar power.

With the frequent mentions of "Abraham" and "Jacob," I remembered the Biblical "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" - a phrase that shows up a lot in the Old Testament.  The characters in the Miss Peregrine books are like those Biblical figures in that they're successive generations.  The Biblical Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was the father of Jacob.  This line of names is the same in the Miss Peregrine books, except for the middle one.  In the books, Abraham was the father of Frank, who is the father of Jacob.  Frank, unlike Abraham and Jacob, doesn't have peculiar powers, and he doesn't fit into that progression of Biblical names.

About three weeks after I first thought about those names, I happened to read something about how the Biblical Abraham and Jacob both had two names.  Abraham was first named Abram, and Jacob is also called Israel.  I don't think it's exactly the same situation for both figures (Abraham replaced Abram while Jacob and Israel are both used), but they do each have two names that they're known by, which got me thinking about duality.  This brought me back to the Abraham and Jacob in the Miss Peregrine books.  They too have a duality of sorts because they're part of the peculiar world and part of the normal world.

The cover of the book also has the signatures of the peculiar children (and a few other characters):

I noticed that Hugh's last name is Apiston:

It's an appropriate name because Hugh's peculiar power is the ability to control bees, and Apiston seems to come from apis, the Latin word for bee.  It's still visible in the English word apiary.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy

About two weeks ago, I finished re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy.  As I've been re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia books this time, I've been looking for more instances of Aslan-as-Christ, which I've talked about in some other posts.  I found two in The Horse and His Boy, one of which I felt absolutely foolish for not having noticed the last time I read it.

The first (and the one I felt foolish for not having noticed before) is near the end of Chapter Eleven (The Unwelcome Fellow Traveller).  As Shasta is travelling through the woods, he becomes aware that "someone or somebody was walking beside him" and that "he had really no idea how long it had been there."  At first, Shasta can't see who it is because it's so dark, but eventually, it's revealed that the "someone or somebody" is Aslan.  After Shasta talks with him for awhile, "the pale brightness of the mist and the fiery brightness of the Lion rolled themselves together into a swirling glory and gathered themselves up and disappeared."

There are more than a few similarities between Shasta's encounter with Aslan and the two disciples going to Emmaus in Luke 24.  While the disciples are travelling they meet someone they don't know at first ("But their eyes were kept from recognizing him." - Luke 24:16).  They talk with him for awhile, but it isn't until he takes bread, blesses it, and gives it to them that they recognize him as Jesus, at which point He vanishes.

Within Shasta's conversation with Aslan, there are a few other elements that hint at Aslan-as-Christ.  When Shasta asks the lion who he is, he replies:  "'Myself,' said the voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again, 'Myself', loud and clear and gay: and then the third time 'Myself', whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it."  First, there's the Trinity in the three "Myself"s, and second, "Myself" seems to have some relation with God's "I AM WHO I AM" in Exodus 3.

There's also the light.  "Now, the whiteness around him [Shasta] became a shining whiteness; his eyes began to blink.  ...  He could see the mane and ears and head of his horse quite easily now.  A golden light fell on them from the left.  He thought it was the sun.  ...  It was from the Lion that the light came."  There's a similarity between this and Christ's Transfiguration:  "And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light" - Matthew 17:2.  Both descriptions involve the same elements:  the sun, whiteness, and a shining light.

The narrator then describes Aslan as - among other things - "the High King above all kings in Narnia," which seems to be a reference to Revelation 19:16: "On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords."  Both are kings, but each is a higher king than all other kings.

The second instance of Aslan-as-Christ (which I actually found last time I read the book) is in Chapter Fourteen (How Bree Became a Wiser Horse).  Aslan jumps over the wall into the Hermit's courtyard and then talks with Aravis, Bree, and Hwin.  Aslan says to Bree, "You poor, proud frightened Horse, draw near.  Nearer still, my son.  Do not dare not to dare.  Touch me.  Smell me.  Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers.  I am a true Beast."  It's a similar situation to Christ's appearing to His disciples after the resurrection.  "And he said to them, 'Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.  Touch me, and see.  For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.'" - Luke 24:38.  "Then he said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side.  Do not disbelieve, but believe.'" - John 20:27.  Where Christ offered His hands and feet and the scars in His hands and side, Aslan offers his paws, tail, and whiskers.  While it's not as close a resemblance, there's also a similarity between Aslan's jumping over the wall and Christ's appearing "although the doors were locked" (John 20:26).  Both arrive despite that which is meant to keep people out.