Summary



SONNET 73PARAPHRASEThat time of year thou mayst in me beholdIn me you can see that time of yearWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangWhen a few yellow leaves or none at all hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,On the branches, shaking against the cold,Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.Bare ruins of church choirs where lately the sweet birds sang.In me thou seest the twilight of such dayIn me you can see only the dim light that remainsAs after sunset fadeth in the west,After the sun sets in the west,Which by and by black night doth take away,Which is soon extinguished by black night,Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.The image of death that envelops all in rest.In me thou see'st the glowing of such fireI am like a glowing emberThat on the ashes of his youth doth lie,Lying on the dying flame of my youth,As the death-bed whereon it must expire,As on the death bed where it must finally expire,Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.Consumed by that which once fed it.This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,This you sense, and it makes your love more determinedTo love that well which thou must leave ere long.Causing you to love that which you must give up before long.SummaryIn this poem, the speaker invokes a series of metaphors to characterize the nature of what he perceives to be his old age. In the first quatrain, he tells the beloved that his age is like a “time of year,” late autumn, when the leaves have almost completely fallen from the trees, and the weather has grown cold, and the birds have left their branches. In the second quatrain, he then says that his age is like late twilight, “As after sunset fadeth in the west,” and the remaining light is slowly extinguished in the darkness, which the speaker likens to “Death’s second self.” In the third quatrain, the speaker compares himself to the glowing remnants of a fire, which lies “on the ashes of his youth”—that is, on the ashes of the logs that once enabled it to burn—and which will soon be consumed “by that which it was nourished by”—that is, it will be extinguished as it sinks into the ashes, which its own burning created. In the couplet, the speaker tells the young man that he must perceive these things, and that his love must be strengthened by the knowledge that he will soon be parted from the speaker when the speaker, like the fire, is extinguished by time.Sonnet?73takes up one of the most pressing issues of the first?126sonnets, the speaker’s anxieties regarding what he perceives to be his advanced age, and develops the theme through a sequence of metaphors each implying something different. The first quatrain, which employs the metaphor of the winter day, emphasizes the harshness and emptiness of old age, with its boughs shaking against the cold and its “bare ruined choirs” bereft of birdsong. In the second quatrain, the metaphor shifts to that of twilight, and emphasizes not the chill of old age, but rather the gradual fading of the light of youth, as “black night” takes away the light “by and by”. But in each of these quatrains, with each of these metaphors, the speaker fails to confront the full scope of his problem: both the metaphor of winter and the metaphor of twilight imply cycles, and impose cyclical motions upon the objects of their metaphors, whereas old age is final. Winter follows spring, but spring will follow winter just as surely; and after the twilight fades, dawn will come again. In human life, however, the fading of warmth and light is not cyclical; youth will not come again for the speaker. In the third quatrain, he must resign himself to this fact. The image of the fire consumed by the ashes of its youth is significant both for its brilliant disposition of the past—the ashes of which eventually snuff out the fire, “consumed by that which it was nourished by”—and for the fact that when the fire is extinguished, it can never be lit again.In this sense, Sonnet?73?is more complex than it is often considered supposed by critics and scholars. It is often argued that?73?and sonnets like it are simply exercises in metaphor—that they propose a number of different metaphors for the same thing, and the metaphors essentially mean the same thing. But to make this argument is to miss the psychological narrative contained within the choice of metaphors themselves. Sonnet?73is not simply a procession of interchangeable metaphors; it is the story of the speaker slowly coming to grips with the real finality of his age and his impermanence in time.The couplet of this sonnet renews the speaker’s plea for the young man’s love, urging him to “love well” that which he must soon leave. It is important to note that the couplet could not have been spoken after the first two quatrains alone. No one loves twilight because it will soon be night; instead they look forward to morning. But after the third quatrain, in which the speaker makes clear the nature of his “leav[ing] ere long,” the couplet is possible, and can be treated as a poignant and reasonable exhortation to the beloved.Notesthat time of year (1):?i.e., being late autumn or early winter.?When yellow leaves... (2):?compare?Macbeth?(5.3.23)?"my way of life/is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf."Bare ruin'd choirs (4):?a reference to the remains of a church or, more specifically, a chancel, stripped of its roof and exposed to the elements. The choirs formerly rang with the sounds of 'sweet birds'. Some argue that lines 3 and 4 should be read without pause -- the 'yellow leaves' shake against the 'cold/Bare ruin'd choirs.' If we assume the adjective 'cold' modifies 'Bare ruin'd choirs', then the image becomes more concrete -- those boughs are sweeping against the ruins of the church. Some editors, however, choose to insert 'like' into the opening of line 4, thus changing the passage to mean 'the boughs of the yellow leaves shake against the cold like the jagged arches of the choir stand exposed to the cold.' Noted 18th-century scholar George Steevens commented that this image "was probably suggested to Shakespeare by our desolated monasteries. The resemblance between the vaulting of a Gothic isle [sic] and an avenue of trees whose upper branches meet and form an arch overhead, is too striking not to be acknowledged. When the roof of the one is shattered, and the boughs of the other leafless, the comparison becomes more solemn and picturesque" (Quoted in Smith, p. 148).?black night (7):?a metaphor for death itself. As 'black night' closes in around the remaining light of the day, so too does death close in around the poet.Death's second self (8):?i.e. 'black night' or 'sleep.'?Macbeth?refers to sleep as "The death of each day's life" (2.2.49).?In me thou see'st...was nourish'd by (9-12):?The following is a brilliant paraphrase by early 20th-century scholar Kellner: "As the fire goes out when the wood which has been feeding it is consumed, so is life extinguished when the strength of youth is past." (Quoted in Rollins, p. 191)?that (12):?i.e., the poet's desires.?This (14):?i.e., the demise of the poet's youth and passion.?To love that well (12):?The meaning of this phrase and of the concluding couplet has caused much debate. Is the poet saying that the young man now understands that he will lose his own youth and passion, after listening to the lamentations in the three preceding quatrains? Or is the poet saying that the young man now is aware of the poet's imminent demise, and this knowledge makes the young man's love for the poet stronger because he might soon lose him? What must the young man give up before long -- his youth or his friend? For more on this dilemma please see the commentary below.?from spark notes_____from Shakespeare onlineSonnets 71-74 are typically analyzed as a group, linked by the poet's thoughts of his own mortality. However, Sonnet 73 contains many of the themes common throughout the entire body of sonnets, including the ravages of time on one's physical well-being and the mental anguish associated with moving further from youth and closer to death. Time's destruction of great monuments juxtaposed with the effects of age on human beings is a convention seen before, most notably in?Sonnet 55.?The poet is preparing his young friend, not for the approaching literal death of his body, but the metaphorical death of his youth and passion. The poet's deep insecurities swell irrepressibly as he concludes that the young man is now focused only on the signs of his aging -- as the poet surely is himself. This is illustrated by the linear development of the three quatrains. The first two quatrains establish what the poet perceives the young man now sees as he looks at the poet: those yellow leaves and bare boughs, and the faint afterglow of the fading sun. The third quatrain reveals that the poet is speaking not of his impending physical death, but the death of his youth and subsequently his youthful desires -- those very things which sustained his relationship with the young man.?Throughout the 126 sonnets addressed to the young man the poet tries repeatedly to impart his wisdom of Time's wrath, and more specifically, the sad truth that time will have the same effects on the young man as it has upon the poet. And as we see in the concluding couplet of Sonnet 73, the poet has this time succeeded. The young man now understands the importance of his own youth, which he will be forced to 'leave ere long' (14).?It must be reiterated that some critics assume the young man 'perceives' not the future loss of his own youth, but the approaching loss of the poet, his dear friend. This would then mean that the poet is speaking of his death in the literal sense. Feuillerat argues thatEven if we make allowance for the exaggeration which is every poet's right, Shakespeare was not young when he wrote this sonnet. It is overcast by the shadow of death and belongs to a date perhaps not far from 1609. (The Composition of Shakespeare's Plays, p. 72)This interpretation is less popular because it is now generally accepted that all 154 sonnets were composed before 1600, so Shakespeare would have been no older than thirty-six. However, the sonnets were not initially printed in the order we now accept them, and an error in sequence is very possible.?Sonnet 73 is one of Shakespeare's most famous works, but it has prompted both tremendous praise and sharp criticism. Included here are excerpts from commentaries by two noted Shakespearean scholars, John Barryman and John Crowe Ransom:The fundamental emotion [in Sonnet 73] is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and the final season of it; then only a day, and the stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of the day, and the final minutes of it;?then?-- entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even now a merely objective "that," like a third-person corpse! -- the poet. The imagery begins and continues as visual -- yellow, sunset, glowing -- and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first quatrain one heard?sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire, makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final immediate triumph of the poem's imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed invoked -- that the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Henry's reign, where 'late' -- not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem -- the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming -- as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem?knows. Instinct is here, after all, a kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English.(John Berryman,?The Sonnets)?*****The structure is good, the three quatrains offering distinct yet equivalent figures for the time of life of the unsuccessful and to-be-pitied lover. But the first quatrain is the boldest, and the effect of the whole is slightly anti-climactic. Within this quatrain I think I detect a thing which often characterizes Shakespeare's work within the metaphysical style: he is unwilling to renounce the benefit of his earlier style, which consisted in the breadth of the associations; that is, he will not quite risk the power of a single figure but compounds the figures. I refer to the two images about the boughs. It is one thing to have the boughs shaking against the cold, and in that capacity they carry very well the fact of the old rejected lover; it is another thing to represent them as ruined choirs where the birds no longer sing. The latter is a just representation of the lover too, and indeed a subtler and richer one, but the two images cannot, in logical rigor, co-exist. Therefore I deprecate?shake against the cold. And I believe everybody will deprecate?sweet. This term is not an objective image at all, but a term to be located at the subjective pole of the experience; it expects to satisfy a feeling by naming it (this is, by just having it) and is a pure sentimentalism.(John Crowe Ransom,?Shakespeare at Sonnets).For more on how the sonnets are grouped, please see the?general introduction to Shakespeare's sonnetsSONNET 73 SUMMARY?BACK?NEXT?Before we go into summarizing Sonnet 73, we should make one thing clear from the start: not much really happens in this poem as far as ideas are concerned. Basically, you've got one idea (the speaker is growing old, and it stinks) that runs from line 1 all the way down to line 12.In lines 13-14, you get a different idea, though it's related to the first one. The speaker tells the person he is talking to that, because he (the speaker) is going to die soon, the other person should treasure their love all the more.Fair enough—so?why?are we reading this poem exactly? Well, the thing is that, this being a poem and all, it's a lot less about?what?the poet says and a lot more abouthow?he says it. In this case,?how?the poet says it makes all the difference. That's because Sonnet 73 is really all about the poet showing off—by using a different main metaphor in each of the three quatrains.In quatrain 1, the main idea is all about the changing of the seasons: the speaker compares his middle-aged self to a tree that is losing its leaves in fall. In quatrain 2, he changes imagery. Now, the speaker compares himself to a fading sunset. Then, in quatrain 3, he changes things up again, this time comparing himself to the last glow of a fire in the process of burning out.Throughout all this time, we haven't heard anything about love, or the specific relationship between the speaker and whomever he is speaking to. So when the concluding couplet comes around, it gets to have a nice surprise effect by revealing exactly the details that have remained hidden until now. This is all pretty nifty, in Shmoop's humble opinion.QUATRAIN 1 SUMMARY?BACK?NEXT?Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.Line 1That time of year thou mayst in me behold,The very first line of Shakespeare's poem hits us up with some classic, you know, Shakespearean language, so to speak—stuff like "thou," "mayst," and "behold."Really, though, what the speaker is saying here is very simple: "You can see that time of year in me."?Well, maybe that isn't so clear after all. Which time of year is he talking about? The speaker hasn't told us yet, so we'll have to wait for the next line to find out.?Also, isn't it a bit weird for the speaker to say that you can see a "time of year"?in?him? Is the speaker a tree? Maybe, but it doesn't seem very likely. We're willing to bet that we're dealing with a?metaphor?here—but let's just ride the poem out and see where it takes us.Line 2When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangSo, what time of year "mayst thou behold" in the speaker? Fall, it sounds like. Can we be any more specific than that? Is it early fall, late fall, middle fall?The speaker doesn't seem too sure. If there are still "yellow leaves" on the tree, then it is probably early fall. If there are none, then it sounds more like late fall—almost winter. And if there are "few," then that sounds like somewhere in the middle.Is the speaker totally open about which of these options is the true one? Or does he change his mind twice—first from "yellow leaves" to "none," and then from "none" to "few"—so that the last option shows his true opinion??We're not sure that this line gives you enough information to answer this last question—we'll have to keep reading to find out for sure. One thing's for sure though: generally speaking, the speaker thinks that his life is?in its autumn phase.?Which raises the question: what's the autumn of a life? (Now we're getting into, you know, that whole?metaphor?business.) Is the speaker super old and geriatric? Nah, that's winter. We're betting autumn's a metaphor for middle age.?Depending on where the speaker?is?in his autumn phase (he hasn't told us yet), he might be in early, middle, or late middle age.?But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We don't even know where those leaves are hanging. Let's read on to find out.Line 3Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,Line 3 tells us where those leaves (however many of them there are) are hanging: on the "boughs" of some trees that are "shak[ing] against the cold."What's the speaker talking about here, and how does it fit into the general picture (or metaphor) he's been sketching for us so far?Actually, it's pretty simple. If the speaker is comparing himself to a tree, then the "boughs" or, if you like,?limbs?of that tree must be like… you got it: thelimbs?of his body.?And the cold? We think it's pretty much up to interpretation, but we'd say it's got to have something to do with old age, death, sickness—you know, the general bad stuff that happens to you when you get old.?Anything else interesting going on in this line? Like, maybe, a hidden joke? We'll give you a hint: think of who wrote this poem.Got it? That's right. We don't know about you, but we think there's a pretty clear?pun?in here. A "bough" isn't that far from a "spear," if you think about it—so a "bough" that "shake[s]" is pretty much like a "spear" that "shake[s]," making this a secret reference to… our main man himself.?Apparently, Shakespeare enjoyed working shout-outs to himself into his poems. For other sonnets that play jokes on Shakespeare's name (leading to lots of obscene puns), check out?Sonnets 135?and?136.Line 4Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.Here, the speaker goes a bit further in describing those "boughs which shake against the cold" he introduced in the last line. Let's see if we can break down what he's saying to make sense of it.?First thing's first: "Bare ruined choirs." The words "bare" and "ruined" shouldn't cause you too much trouble, but the word "choirs" is a bit trickier. It's actually an example of?metonymy, as the speaker's referring to a piece of furniture—the wooden seats in a church where the members of the choir sit.?Who are the members of this choir? Shakespeare tells us at the end of the line: the "sweet birds" that "sang" there.?Bearing in mind that everything we've learned so far in quatrain 1 is ametaphor?for the speaker being in middle age, it's a little unclear what these "sweet birds" might stand in for. Got any ideas??We're not positive, but we think the general idea must be something like youthful charm—and the same goes for the "leaves" we learned about in line 2. Now that the choirs are bare, his youth is gone.?And the word "late" in this line doesn't mean what you probably think it means. The idea isn't that this choir of birds is giving a late-night performance on the branch. Instead, "late" here means something like lately, or recently.In other words, it wasn't long ago that the birds were singing in the boughs. Does this mean (going back to the metaphor in line 2) that it must be?earlyfall, or early middle age??We don't think so—not necessarily, anyway. The general idea is more that the speaker is amazed and shocked at how recently he was young, at how quickly time passes.?Now that we've got one quatrain under our belts, we thought we'd draw your attention to the?meter?of the poem. Hear that daDUM daDUM under the lines? That's?iambic pentameter, the chosen meter of sonnet writers the world over.?And while we're on the subject of form, did you notice anything else at work here? How about a?rhyme scheme? "Behold" rhymes with "cold" and "hang" rhymes with "sang," which gives us ABAB. Check out our "Form and Meter" section for more.QUATRAIN 2 SUMMARY?BACK?NEXT?Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.Line 5In me thou seest the twilight of such day,Does this line remind you of anything? That's right: this line recalls the very beginning of the poem.So line 5 is a lot like line 1. In both of them the speaker is talking to some "thou" person; in both of them, the speaker tells this person that he (or she) can "behold" or "see" something "in" him. Only now the speaker is comparing himself to a time of the day, instead of a time of the year.?But, "Such?day"? What does he mean,?such?day? Once again, the poet sneakily doesn't give us all the information we need, thus forcing us to read on to the next line. He's a clever one, that Shakespeare, and he's a master ofenjambment.Line 6As after sunset fadeth in the west,Ah, now we see what kind of day the speaker means. That said, the word order here can be a little bit tricky.Just to be sure we're on the same page here, let's rearrange this line (and the end of the previous line) as follows: "the twilight of such day as fadeth in the west after sunset." Putting the words in this order lets you see more clearly what Shakespeare means: the last bit of day that is fading?after?the sun has already set.?Based on what we've read of the poem so far, do you have any guesses about what stage of life this is a?metaphor?for? Yes? Good. Let's keep reading to see if you're right.Line 7Which by and by black night doth take away,We're sure you got the general gist of what's going on here during your first read-through of the poem. That said, once you actually take a close look at what's going on, the grammar can be a bit tricky.?Just so that we're on the same page: the word "Which" at the beginning of this line refers back to the "twilight of such day" we learned about back in line 5.Line 6, of course, told us more about the kind of day he was talking about.What new, meaningful information does line 7 add to what we already know about this fading day? We think it's basically a change of focus. From the previous two lines, we know that the sun has already set, but that a glow still remains on the horizon. Now, line 7 shows us the inevitable flipside of that image: if daylight is fading, that means "black night" is increasing and taking away the day.Now we get to ask you the same question we asked for the previous line: is this all a?metaphor? And, if so, what's it a metaphor for? Just so you know, your time for guessing might be running out—not too give too much away, but our man Shakespeare might well end up spilling the beans all by himself…Line 8Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.There you have it, folks. Just in case we really couldn't figure it out, Shakespeare tells us: the "black night" that takes away the day is the "second self"—a.k.a. the alter ego, the double, the brother from another mother—of Death itself… Ooga booga booga!?Once the beginning of line 8 reveals that quatrain 2 is all a big?metaphor?for aging and death, it becomes easy to see how the end of the line contains a double meaning, so that the word "rest" means?both?the sleep that comes at the end of each day,?and?the metaphorical rest of death, that comes at the end of a person's life.?Finally, at the end of this quatrain, we can safely say we've got a new addition to our?rhyme scheme. "Day" rhymes with "away" and "west" rhymes with "rest," but none of those guys rhyme with any of the words from quatrain 1. So we've got ABAB CDCD. Nifty, no?QUATRAIN 3 SUMMARY?BACK?NEXT?Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.Line 9In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,Line 9 begins the third major section of the poem, quatrain 3. Are you starting to notice a pattern here??That's right once again the speaker is telling the person that he's talking to that there's something to be seen in him.?But the similarity between these three lines doesn't end there. Notice also that each one of these three section-openers introduces a?different?set of imagery to serve as a metaphor for the speaker's situation in life. In line 1 we got the time of year, the dominant?metaphor?in quatrain 1; in line 5 we got the "twilight of such day," the dominant metaphor in quatrain 2, and now, at the beginning of quatrain 3, we get "the glowing of such fire."?Based on what we've read of the poem so far, line 9 can help us make some predictions about the rest of quatrain 3. From where we're standing now, we can probably assume that quatrain 3 will use fire imagery as a metaphor for aging and death. But hey, that's just Shmoop's guess. What's yours?Line 10That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,Hmm, now this is a tad unexpected. Doesn't it seem a little bit like Shakespeare is mixing up his metaphors here? Like, sure, the "ashes" bit at the beginning of this line sounds like it goes with the "fire" imagery—but what about the "his youth" part?It's not that the general idea is unclear—we can tell that "his youth" refers to the earlier fuel for the fire that is now burnt up and reduced to ashes—but it still seems weird that Shakespeare would refer to the glowing of the fire as having a "youth."It's almost as if, in line 9 and the beginning of line 10 (up to "ashes"), Shakespeare decided to refer to the human speaker of the poem in terms of imagery derived from fires—but then, in the rest of line 10, he doubles back on himself and starts referring to the glowing?fire?metaphorically in terms derived from human life.We read this line as?personifying?fire. No seriously. If fire has a youth, which is when it's young and strong and blazing, then it has to have an old age. That's when a fire's just kind of smoldering, burning up the last chunks of wood, but mostly just reducing to ashes.Line 11As the death-bed whereon it must expire,In this line, we can see Shakespeare following the same pattern he started in line 10: describing the glowing of the fire (which he originally introduced as a way of illustrating human experience) in human terms.?Here, the last remnant of the fire burning on top of a heap of ashes gets compared to a person on their deathbed.We don't know about you, but we think the word "must" here conveys a strong sense of the inevitability of death.Line 12Consumed with that which it was nourished by.This line might seem a little strange on a first reading, but it becomes less so when you remember that (strictly speaking) the "glowing" of the fire, not the fire itself, is the central image of quatrain 3.The "glowing" was originally "nourished" (i.e. kept in existence) by the wood or whatever it was burning. But as the fire keeps burning, the fuel turns to ash.Soon enough, the time will come when there is no fuel left. When that happens, it will be safe to say that the "glowing" has been "consumed" (i.e. destroyed) by the same thing (the "fire") that kept it in existence, since the ashes are snuffing out the fire.Of course, in all of this you have to bear in mind that the glowing fire image isn't just there for its own sake. Based on the poem so far, it's pretty clear that this imagery is being used as a?metaphor?for human life.How would you match up line 12 to an idea of human life? We at Shmoop would put it this way: youth has a "fire in its belly" that makes the beginning of life an exciting time. After a while, however, people who lead very active, exciting lives can experience "burnout." Thus, you could say that the very same energy that kept a person going was the same thing that eventually wore them down.?(Notice how, when we use expressions like "fire of youth" and "burnout" in everyday English, we end up using poetic metaphors similar to what Shakespeare uses in his poem? We think that's pretty darn cool.)COUPLET SUMMARY?BACK?NEXT?Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,With line 13, we move into a different phase of the poem: the final?couplet. Where the first 12 lines of the poem (divided into quatrains 1-3), impressed us with their Rubik's cube-like ability to take a topic (Life/Death/Aging) and twist it around into new shapes and colors, the couplet's job is to take all of that stuff and (a) sum it up, and (b) add a new twist.?So that's the challenge. Let's see how line 13 meets it. As far as summing up goes, it looks to us at Shmoop like Shakespeare does a pretty handy job of this in the first three words of the line: "This thou perceiv'st." This works as a way of summing up in two ways. First, there is the simple repetition of one of the main ideas of the poem: sight. So the verb "perceiv'st" in line 13 echoes not only the preceding "seest" from line 9, but also the "seest" in line 5, and even takes us all the way back to the word "behold" in the first line of the poem.We see the second way the line acts as a summing-up device when we ask, "What is it?that 'thou perceiv'st'"? In other words, what does the "This" at the beginning of line 13 refer to??If you ask Shmoop (though you may have a different interpretation), the word "This" at the beginning of the line really refers to everything that the speaker has talked about before; in a sense, "This" refers to the preceding twelve lines of the poem.?You could almost imagine that the speaker at this point is, literally, imagining that the "thou" he is talking to is reading?this very poem, the one that you Shmoopers are currently reading. Pretty cool, don't you think?Okay, so that's how line 13 gets the idea of summing-up in there. As for the twist, that comes in the second half of the line. Any guesses what it is??Yep, "love." For the first time, Shakespeare makes clear the nature of the relationship between the person speaking and the person he is speaking to.?Not only that, but he makes a?connection?between the previous twelve lines and the new theme he's introducing. Perceiving all these things, the speaker says, will make the love of the person he is talking to "more strong."Why will this happen? Let's move on to the last line of the poem to find out.Line 14To love that well which thou must leave ere long.?Now, we get the final payoff of the poem. The speaker is telling the listener that not only will their love "become more strong" when they realize that the speaker won't be around forever, but they'll also love him "well," i.e., they'll cherish him all the more.?In this way, Shakespeare neatly ties the themes of love and death together into a single complex idea. Way to go, Big Willy, way to go.?This sense of the special preciousness of those things that don't last forever is a common theme in Shakespeare's sonnets, though it is usually counterbalanced by calling attention to things that are slightly more permanent, like, say, poems.?Poems, of course, only last as long as people read them. So, if you liked Sonnet 73, why don't you help his other poems exist by?reading some of them. And as you do, you might try to keep in mind the themes and technique of Sonnet 73, so you can see how other poems play and experiment with this same material, which they totally do, and just as well. ................
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