SONNET 73

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 seest 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

Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The sonnet has not a title with semantic implications, and it belongs to a collection of 154 other sonnets.

The sonnet is composed ofthree quatrains and one couplet and shows an alternate rhyme scheme.

The first quatrain is an introduction of the sonnet’s theme: Shakespeare explains that is age is like late autumn in which when the leaves have almost completely fallen from the trees.

In the second quatrain, he then says that his age is like late twilight when light is replaced by darkness.

In the third quatrain, the speaker compares himself to the ember of a fire, which lies on the ashes of the wood that once enabled it to burn.

In the couplet Shakespeare tells the listener that his love must be strengthened by the awareness that they will be soon apart separated.

The sonnet is characterized by a lot of metaphors by which he explained his age: the most significant ones are autumn, twilight and ember. Each of them refers to the poet’s age.

In this sonnet the poet expresses thoughts about mortality: these lines describe the shift from the end of the youth and the approach to death, which is a very significant and particular period. Feeling of anguish are expressed in front of the awareness that human life has an end.

Some of the themes contained in sonnet 73 are very common in Shakespeare’s sonnets the ravages of time on one's physical well-being and the mental anguish associated with moving further from youth and closer to death.