Released-question focus (restated): Compare the situations presented in the two poems and analyze the poetic techniques Keats and Longfellow use to explore them.

John Keats, When I Have Fears (1818), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mezzo Cammin (1842); public-domain poems
WHEN I HAVE FEARS
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd 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.

MEZZO CAMMIN
Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, to build
Some tower of song with lofty parapet.
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret
Of restless passions that would not be stilled,
But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;
Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,—
A city in the twilight dim and vast,
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,—
And hear above me on the autumnal blast
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

Released-question provenance: 2008 main Question 1. Official PDF: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/apc/ap08_eng_lit_frq.pdf

Rights note: Task restated; both nineteenth-century poems are public domain. KSSR is not affiliated with or endorsed by College Board.