Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
William Shakespeare
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
No one who writes about poetry in English can avoid Shakespeare. Arguably the greatest writer the world has seen, he is best known for his dramas: Tragedies, comedies, histories. But he also wrote a remarkable poetic sequence, of sonnets. Many of them, I confess, are beyond me: Try as I might, they elude my full understanding. The one I am most attracted to is sonnet 73, which I find both exceedingly lovely and deeply resonant. I have opened this letter with the sonnet, and hope to traverse its deep beauties in what follows.
Let’s begin by talking about metaphors. A metaphor is a comparison: made explicit, when the comparison is clear (‘like’ or ‘as’), we call the metaphor a simile. In this great sonnet by Shakespeare each of the first three quatrains is based on a metaphor. All are comparisons to the aging human: fall’s descent into winter, day’s descent into night, fire’s tendency to burn down to embers and ashes. Note that the first two comparisons are to a descent that, cyclic, will lead to an ascent: The year ends, and spring returns with its greenery and increasing warmth. The day ends, night succeeds it, and a new day dawns. But the third metaphor is final, not cyclic: A fire burns down; when there is no more fuel, the fire is extinguished.
Those three quatrains, and the three metaphors, are about human aging: Life is diminished, and in the second and third quatrains, ended. The poem, then, is largely about decline and endings. Sad, somber, and as John Berryman once put it in a poem of deep understanding of his own emotions, self-pitying. We grow old, and frail, and then we die.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
I am not sure if there is a more beautiful opening to a poem than these lines. ‘You can see in me,’ the poem begins, the markings of autumn: leaves turn color and most of them fall; the bare branches shake when the wind blows, no longer covered by rippling leaves; churches and cathedrals of old are now ruins, and the birds no longer sing in them.
Consider the second and third lines, “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…” Older, now without the chlorophyll that made them green, the leaves are now yellow – if they are there at all, for many or maybe all of them have fallen as the winter’s cold and low light have advanced.
The metaphor is based on visual resemblance. There is a metaphor within the metaphor: bar branches are compared to the architectural remains of a ruined church. This is part of the larger metaphor: a comparison between the autumn of the year and the decline of life. The branches of the trees, now with few leaves or leafless, intersect, trembling (in the wind, which the poet records as “against the cold”) in a structure which reminds the poet of the remains of a cathedral, arching lines which define an interior space. The church, now in ruins, still retains the architectural structure which undergirded the space in which the congregation worshipped. The choirs, forward spaces behind the apse and the altar of a church, are now in ruins: Without wooden stalls, without finery, only the stony ‘bones’ of the structure still stand. Why “choirs?” The choir, part of the ruined church, is where singing took place, and so their ruin reminds the reader of the song which once resonated within the edifice, coming from human voices; this is in some sense redoubled because the natural world reaffirms what has happened in the human sphere: “Where late the sweet birds sang.” Among the ruins, song is no more.
In the first quatrain, the age of the poet is compared to two ruins, that of the summer season—few or no leaves remain on the trees, which are now only the bare branches – and that of a church which had its ‘fulness’ many years before, and now stands as an edifice of bare rock that is only a reminder of what formerly stood in the spot. Its double corrective – the leaves are yellow; no, there are no leaves left; no, there are a few yellow leaves remaining – emphasizes the greenery that has been lost. Even the trees, and nature itself, seem to be personified, shaking in fear and regret at the loss of the summer and the encroaching cold.
In this ‘skeleton’ of the church that the metaphor has constructed, the choirs are, like the trees, “bare” as well as “ruined.” Fall and the approach of winter, bare branches, a ruined church, the loss of song (ah, earlier – “of late”—the birds sang so sweetly): All come together in a landscape of loss. All this to ‘objectify,’ to represent, what is happening to the speaker. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.” Like the tree without leaves, like the church which is only a remnant of its former self, like the songlessness where formerly there were sweet songs – the speaker has entered a ti[HG1] me, older age, when absence, ruin, lack of song, are visible to those who see him. [Note that, for a poet, the loss of song is particularly acute.]
Not just anyone, though everyone: We must remember that this is a love poem, and not merely a universal lament. The “thou” indicates, in the older splitting of the second person of English, that the dear and familiar (“thou”) is being addressed, not the more distant and impersonal “you.” This is not just a universal lament about aging, but a personal address to a love.
Thus, this sonnet addressed to a lover recognizes that age and diminishment has become the speaker’s current state. As can be seen.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
As the seasons culminate with the end of fall and the advancement of winter, the day culminates in the night. Twilight – akin to those last leaves in fall – marks the poet’s state, a time after the sun has set. This stanza is a simile – “As after sunset fadeth in the west” – in which the speaker’s life is compared to the darkening sky of evening, a time before the light has totally disappeared but when darkness is falling. Twilight now, but night will assuredly come, in this stanza of the poem, as in the life we know, as ‘night’ falls on life itself: “By and by black night doth take away” the last rays of light. The twilight will end and blackness will prevail.
With the fall of night, sleep comes – “Death’s second self” – and “seals up all in rest.” A metaphorical triumvirate has been established in these first two stanzas: of decline, loss of consciousness, a final ending. Autumn/winter or twilight/night, is followed by sleep and death. As sleep comes after day and twilight; as winter comes after summer’s abundance following the passage of sweetness into fall’s decline: So death will come to the aging speaker.
[It occurs to me that this letter is more dense than usual, because it is investigative of and dependent on the gloriously rich and figurative imagery Shakespeare uses. Metaphor, I called it, earlier. So to give you a break from thi sclose textual analysis I will pause and bring forward a distinction that has long shaped how I think about things. A Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson, proposed in 1956 that all language worked either metonymically or metaphorically. Let’s put language aside – can we really do that?—and ask the question I often pose to myself: How do we make connections between things, or experiences? Why is the world not a just a jumble of events?
These questions bring me to the brilliance of Jakobson’s analysis. He distinguished between metaphor (things related by similarity) and metonymy (things related by being close to one another in space or time). Similarity or contiguity. The ship shares qualities with a plow – both move on sort of flat surfaces and leave furrows behind them – and so we can say, metaphorically, ‘the ship plows the sea,’ or in even more explicit terms, with a simile, ‘the sea moves through the sea like a plow moves through the field.’
We can also move from a ship on the sea to an island in the sea where it ports. This contiguity in space is metonymy, ‘the ship is at the dock’ or ‘th hip is on the sea.’ So is ‘the ship docked and the passengers got off,’ which is another sort of metonymy, a continuity in time: One thing happens, and then in time another thing happens.
That’s it. We form connections either by similarity, because the two things or experiences have similar qualities; or we form connections because things are next to each other, either spatially or as time passes.
That is a remarkably powerful tool: All the connectedness we encounter in our consciousness either results from metaphor of metonymy (or, often, both, as in ‘the ship plows the sea as it makes its way toward the island’). That’s it, no fancy legerdemain or abracadrabra. Things are either like one another, because they share qualities; or happen through proximity in space, or happen as time proceeds as events are in proximity to one another in time’s stream.
The poem we are considering moves primarily through similarities: Aging, winter following summer, day declining into night, a fire burning down. All share the quality of diminishment and eventual ending. There is some metonymy, as summer gives way in time to fall and then to winter; as day goes down to twilight and then to night; as hot flames go down to burnt ash. But, mostly, it is the quality of decline-and-ending that unites the stanzas, the three metaphors.
So we will head back into the poem, but I hope you have a new tool in your toolbox: Everything we know we know either through shared qualities or a shared position in space or time. Similarity or contiguity. As Emerson said, in another context in “The American Scholar,” “the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order.” Wow.]
We come now to the third quatrain.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
We will want to note the persistence of the personal. In stanza one it was “thou mayst in me;” in stanza two it was ‘in me thou see’st;” here, it is again, “In me thou see’st.” Thus, although the poem charts the speaker’s age, it is always, everywhere, addressed to a person, who we can easily conclude is the poet’s lover.
Much has been written about who the lover was or might have been: A young man? A woman? I myself think it does not really matter, for this is a love poem. A poem lamenting what Marvell called “Time’s slow chapped power” to diminish and finally signal the end, the death, the mortality, of the lover.
The final quatrain moves, having metaphorically compared age to the approach of winter (the last of the seasons of the year) and the oncoming of night (the end of the day), to the burning down of a fire. But, as I noted earlier, this metaphor is different. The first two were cyclical: “If,” as Shelly famously concluded in his “Ode to the West Wind,” “Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” If night comes, the dawn follows. But fire burning down is not cyclical. When a fire burns down, it is eventually extinguished; what remains are ashes, and no more fire.
Those ashes are the “death-bed” of the fire, what remains of the wood or other fuel that nourished the fire. So the fire not only burns down, it ends – the sonnet says “it must expire.” The ending of the fire is all that remains of what once “nourish’d” its ashes: The fuel that nourished that fire (or love) is burned down. What once fed the fire is consumed by it and is no longer. Ashes, no longer emitting warmth, are cold and dead, now and forever.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Shakespearean sonnets, unlike Petrarchan sonnets, end with a rhymed couplet. Here, we return to the “thou” that has been addressed in each of the stanzas. The first word of the couplet, “this,’ summarizes the poem, indicating that the lover has seen summer turn into fall (and move toward winter), has seen day enter twilight (and move toward night), has seen the final glowing embers before the fire extinguishes itself for lack of fuel.
Having seen these things, the poem indicates (“which”) how the lover responds. Or perhaps it is a fervent wish, for there is a buried imperative in this line – the poet is not only describing how his lover will react, he is urging the lover to respond in this way. The ending of this poem is justly famous, for it indicates that what had seemed to be conclusion only causes a kind of rebirth “(makes thy love more strong”); the decline of the impassioned lover only increases the passion of the beloved. Centuries later Dylan Thomas would famously write, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” This poem prefigures Thomas: The lover, having seen decline, responds by increase (for we need to think about the “more,” of “more strong.”).
Time, which rationality suggests should make us aware of endings, instead makes us aware that since things end, we should embrace them more fervently in the moment as we become aware of the implacable passage of time. “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” There is a paradox here. Knowing that things end does not lead to acceptance of endings, but to a reaction against them, an embrace of the temporal which nevertheless will come to an end, soon. The poet’s lover sees all the signs of decline – of the seasons, of the day, of the fire – and is rebelliously more committed to the fire of passion, the light of love, the fecundity of partnership. Or, at least the poem suggests this as the proper response for the lover,
Yet there is a sad note here, for the lover knows that his or her lover will “leave ere long.” The ending of the relationship, as the ending of all things, will come, “must” come. As I said, the paradoxical response is to love more – or is it more wisely? – that which will soon end. Even as the unavoidable end, be it winter, or night or ashes, is recognized, time is not so much denied as withstood.
The conflict I have raised – of a recognition of ending and a denial of the power of that ending – is in the poem, for poems engage the possibility of saying more than one thing at a time. [Logic does not have this possibility – a thing either is or is not. It is called the law of the excluded middle, and it says that something is either ‘A’ or ‘not A’. It cannot be both.] In the final line of the poem, the question stands before us: is ‘loving well’ a way to say ‘more passionately,’ or is it a way to say ‘with an understanding that all things, including love and the lover, end’? To “love well,” must we accept time and the finality of endings, or must we reject finality and live in the moment?
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his late sonnet, “Carrion Comfort,” “Oh which one? Is it each one?” Shakespeare asks of us, us readers, whether ‘loving well’ means more passionately – this is, after all, a love poem – or loving with a greater understanding that love will have an end in this, our world, where time always moves towards endings . . . And, with Hopkins, he perhaps wants to have ‘each one,’ to see mortality and to recognize that we must love despite our recognition of mortality. Let me repeat the poem’s conclusion, which in its internal tensions leaves the question of endings unresolved: We perhaps need “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”