Study Material 1

Sonnet 73 is part of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. Moreover, this sonnet is part of the Fair Youth
sequence, a series of poems (from sonnets 1 to 126) that are addressed to an unnamed young
man. The Fair Youth sequence has strong romantic language that portrays intense imagery.
Particularly, Sonnet 73 focuses on old age and is addressed to a friend (the unnamed young
man).

Moreover, Sonnet 73 is a Shakespearean sonnet. This means that the poem has
three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet. It has an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme
scheme and it is composed in iambic pentameter. The main theme in Sonnet 73 is the process
of aging and how the lyrical voice feels about it. Most of the poem is introspective with a
pensive tone, but, the final couplet, addresses the unnamed young man directly

Summary: Sonnet 73

In 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.
Analysis

Sonnet 73 takes up one of the most pressing issues of the first 126 sonnets, 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 73 is 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.