#DoubtandBelief

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“When I have Fears that I May Cease to Be” by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be   Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,   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 faery 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.

Keats often writes on his own mortality and in this pieces addresses the subject rather directly. The speaker of the poem worries upon the chance that they might not live to see large amounts of literature pile up in their name, or that they will be able to create great works during their time alive. Worthy of note is the lack of religious tones found in poem however, as can be common when dealing with the topic of death. Having the poem end on the note that it does, being one of somber introspection, brings a very human sincerity to its message. This poem provides an interesting example of a discussion of death that does not include the afterlife.

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“The Lamb” and “The Tyger” by William Blake

In these twin poems by Blake, a symbolic picture of two approaches to belief can be found. Simply put, the speaker in “The Lamb” very innocently accepts God as having made everything and everything is good while the speaker in“The Tyger” is much more inquisitive and asks if the same entity that made the gentle lamb made the fearsome tiger. While certainly not the same vein of religious inquiry and feelings of doubt and belief found in the seventeenth-century literature we study in class, the nature of the two can be linked in a way. Questioning religion and aspects of one’s relationship with their god has a tradition in poetry and these two poems add to this history.

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“Chorus Sacerdotum” from Mustapha by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville (1554-1628)

O wearisome condition of humanity!

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity;

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?

Passion and reason, self-division cause.

Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offenses that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give.

For how should man think that he may not do,

For how should man think that he may not do,

If nature did not fail and punish, too?

Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,

Only commands things difficult and hard,

Forbids us all things which it knows is lust,

Makes easy pains, unpossible reward.

If nature did not take delight in blood,

She would have made more easy ways to good.

We that are bound by vows and by promotion,

With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,

To teach belief in good and still devotion,

To preach of heaven’s of heaven’s wonders and delights;

Yet when each of us in his own heart looks

He finds the God there, far unlike his books.

Throughout the lines of this poem the speaker grapples with contradictions they find in some lines of religious thought. The primary problem the speaker has is the notion that humanity be punished for sins that have been placed in them by God. This notion being put forth by the speaker is concisely summed up in the poem’s third line: “Created sick, commanded to be sound” (Greville 3). The speaker puts the blame of sin upon God rather than humanity by challenging the validity of both the creation of sin and punishment coming from the same source. Late in the poem the focus shifts from this grievance to what the speaker sets up as the source of their pain in this matter, which the speaker says are the methods of religion at the time. The author lived around the same time as John Donne, who is covered extensively in class, and thus lived during a time characterized by protestantism and a hard movement away from most Catholic teachings. Thus the speaker’s answer to the questions they set up lies in preaching methods and the blame is put on “...pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,” which were being done away with at the time. In the final line the speaker addresses their own doubt and states that the way towards a true connection to God, and thus answers, is through a more protestant method of approaching faith.