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, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
As you know, that’s Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, your constant bedside reading. I like it for a lot of
reasons. First, it just sounds wonderful—say it out loud a couple of times and you’ll start to hear how the
words play off each other. Then there’s the rhythm. I often recite it in class when I’m explaining meter
and scansion—how the stressed and unstressed syllables function in lines of poetry. But the thing that
really works here, andp. 176in the next ten lines, is the meaning: the speaker is seriously feeling his age
here and making us feel it, too, with those boughs shaking in the cold winds, those last faded leaves still
hanging, if barely, in the canopy, those empty limbs that formerly were so full of life and song. His leaves,
his hair, have mostly departed, we can surmise, and his appendages are less resolute than formerly, and
of course, he’s entered a quieter period than his youth had been. November in the bones; it makes my
joints ache just to think about it.
Now to the nuts and bolts: Shakespeare didn’t invent this metaphor. This fall/middle-age cliché was
pretty creaky in the knees long before he got hold of it. What he does, brilliantly, is to invest it with a
specificity and a continuity that force us to really see not only the thing he describes—the end of autumn
and the coming of winter—but the thing he’s really talking about, namely the speaker’s standing on the
edge of old age. And of course he, being himself, pulls this off time and again in his poems and plays.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” he asks. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” What
beloved could turn her back on that one? When King Lear is raging in his old man’s madness, he’s doing
it in a winter storm. When the young lovers escape to the enchanted woods to sort out their romantic
difficulties and thereby take their proper places in the adult world, it is a midsummer night.
Nor is the issue always age. Happiness and dissatisfaction have their seasons. A thoroughly unpleasant
king, Richard III, rails against his situation by saying, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “Now is the winter
of our discontent, / Made glorious summer by this son of York.” Even if we don’t know what he means
by that, we know from his tone what he feels and we’re pretty sure it doesn’t say anything good about
this son (with its play on “sun”) of York’s future. Elsewhere he speaks of seasons as having each their
appropriate emotions, as in the song from Cymbeline, with its “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun, / Nor
p. 177the furious winter’s rages.” Summer is passion and love; winter, anger and hatred. The Book of
Ecclesiastes tells us that to everything there is a season. Henry VI, Part II gives us the Shakespearean
formula for the same thing, although a bit more mixed, “Sometimes hath the brightest day a cloud, / And
after summer evermore succeeds / Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold; / So cares and joys
abound, as seasons fleet.” Even his titles tell us seasons matter with him: A Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night
(that is, the last of the twelve days of Christmas), A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Of course, seasons aren’t the private playground of our greatest writer. We sometimes treat old Will as
if he’s the beginning, middle, and end of literature, but he’s not. He began some things, continued others,
and ended a few, but that’s not the same at all. A few other writers have also had something to say about
the seasons in connection with the human experience.
Take Henry James, for instance. He wants to write a story in which the youth, enthusiasm, and lack of
decorum that mark the still comparatively new American republic come into contact with the stuffy and