This poem falls into two major thought groups: *Keats expresses his fear of dying young in the first thought unit, lines 1-12. He fears that he will not fulfill himself as a writer (lines 1-8) and that he will lose his beloved (lines 9-12). *Keats resolves his fears by asserting the unimportance of love and fame in the concluding two and a half lines of this sonnet. The first quatrain (four lines) emphasizes both how …showed first 75 words of 529 total…

…showed last 75 words of 529 total…feelings and ordinary life, so he is able to reach a resolution. He thinks about the human solitariness ("I stand alone") and human insignificance (the implicit contrast betwen his lone self and "the wide world"). The shore is a point of contact, the threshold between two worlds or conditions, land and sea; so Keats is crossing a threshold, from his desire for fame and love to accepting their unimportance and ceasing to fear and yearn.