AP Exam Essay Practice #5

Both "When I Have Fears" by John Keats and "Mezzo Cammin" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow deal with the theme of life's potential.  At first glance, they are extremely similar.  Both seemingly mourn the loss of dreams.  However, careful inspection reveals that the poetic techniques used by both poets points to two distinct messages.  Broadly speaking, the core of these differences is in perspective.  Keats writes of the future, while Longfellow writes of the past.  This relatively small difference cascades into many more

"When I Have Fears" begins with hypothetical wording right at the title.  The entire poem is written looking toward a possible future.  Despite the speaker voicing fears, merely looking at the future rather than the past holds an inherently optimistic quality.  Everything is represented as a worst-case-scenario dread rather than an absolute certainty.  Keats expresses this through carefully structured sentences such as "I may cease to be" and "I may never live to trace."  All these phrases point more toward potential than certainty.  Keats uses other more subtle methods as well.  Compared to "Mezzo Cammin", "When I  Have Fears" contains a much more dream-like tone.  "Faery power", "magic hand of chance" and "fair creature" all indicate an almost whimsical tone.  At the same time, they are ambiguous enough to connote the unsure nature of the future.  Keats may be despairing for what the future holds, but he is certainly not admitting that it is an eventuality.

Where Keats looks to the future, Longfellow mourns the past.  As is to be expected, the result is quite different.  Interestingly, the speaker in "Mezzo Cammin" indicates that life is at a halfway point.  Despite this, Longfellow writes in a perspective looking back over the past.  The line that reads "half-way up the hill, I see the Past" is an almost literal representation of a glass half full mentality.  There is really no realistic reason given why the speaker would prefer to wallow over a gone past rather than celebrate an approaching future.  However, this pessimism results in a weary, almost jaded tone.  Once again, the diction is aimed at supporting this tone, and in the process enhancing the theme.  The inclusion of words such as "killed", "smoking", and "twilight" all point towards a decline or decay of some kind.  This is of course very appropriate as the speaker is contemplating lost opportunities of the past.

Not only do "When I Have Fears" and "Mezzo Cammin" discuss the same topic, they evidently take the same stance on that topic as well. However, the perspective this theme is approached from makes a huge differences in each poem's individual meaning.  Keats writes of the future.  In his mind, failure exists only as one possible future.  Longfellow, on the other hand, writes as if this failure has already happened.  He concedes that he may still be able to accomplish things, but the poem's focus is focused very solidly on the past and losses associated with it.