- or continue to exist in the future. This couplet con-
tains two verbal paradoxes. The fi rst—that black may
be bright—is an especially interesting one, as Stephen
Booth points out, in a culture that viewed “black” as
“ugly” or the direct opposite of “beautiful.” The sec-
ond—the philosophical paradox—is that, even though
no human is powerless to stop or destroy time, a
human’s writings can outlast the lives of lover and
beloved to reveal the love as well as the beauty of the
beloved to future generations as yet undreamed of.
Thus, despite the power of time and mutability that
has aged and killed the lover and the beloved, we are
reading of that love and those people over 400 years
after their deaths.
See also SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM; SHAKESPEARE’S SON-
NETS (OVERVIEW).
Theodora A. JankowskiShakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 73 (“That time
of year thou mayest in me behold”) WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE (1599) Sonnet 73 describes the
speaker’s feelings as he describes his aging to the
beloved. Each quatrain contains a developed image of
just how the speaker views himself as the result of the
aging process. The images also describe the older lover
to the beloved in terms of both the lover’s approaching
death as well as the lover’s approaching old age.
In the fi rst quatrain, the speaker describes himself as
autumn. Since it is diffi cult to picture a season of the
year by itself, the speaker focuses on one specifi c image
of autumn, a tree. In looking at the lover, the beloved
might see a tree in autumn whose leaves have turned
yellow. He might also see a tree that has no leaves left
on, or only a few leaves. The leaves have succumbed to
the shaking of the tree’s boughs caused by the cold
winds of autumn that remind us of the coming of win-
ter. As a result, the speaker looks like a “bare ruined
choir” (l. 4) that is missing all its birds. This image is a
bit complex. Birds live in trees and certainly do sing in
the summer, but more so in the spring, when they are
calling for mates. If a tree is particularly large and
desirable, many birds may choose to nest and sing in
it, so many that we hear a group—or “choir”—of birds
singing, not just one or two. Poets are also sometimes
referred to as “singers,” so the birds could also refer to
the speaker as poet/singer. But a “choir” also refers to
that part of a church where the choir sings. If the choir
is good, they may sound like “sweet birds.” In Gothic
architecture, columns of stone that supported the
church look like bundles of sticks which soar up to the
roof splitting into “branches” that allow stained glass
windows to be inserted. A tree in winter could look as
though it had blue sky stained glass between its
branches.
In the second quatrain, the speaker likens himself to
the twilight of a day. Sunset has faded, and the sky is
dark. Curiously, though, the speaker does not indicate
that this sunset has any color. The light of day is being
taken away by a “black night” (l. 7). Such a night seems
to cause an absence of color or light. Using black to
describe the night also calls up the image of night as
“death’s second self” (l. 8). An unmoving sleeper and a
dead person look alike from a distance. And when
elderly people sleep soundly, there is always the ques-
tion of whether they are just asleep or dead. While the
speaker here is obviously not dead, the image indicates
the progression of age to death.
The third quatrain presents the image of the speaker
as a dying fi re. As a fi re burns down, the fl aming
logs—the fuel of the fi re—are consumed, and what is
left are burning embers on the ash that results from the
logs that started the fi re. Thus, “such fi re” (l. 9) that the
speaker describes is the old fi re, consisting mostly of
“glowing” (l. 9) embers. This fi re lies upon “the ashes
of his youth” (l. 10)—that is, the ashes produced by
burning the logs, the “youth.” Eventually these embers
will die on the “death-bed” (l. 11) of the ashes. Para-
doxically then, the embers will die because they are
“consumed” by that which originally “nourished” (l.
12) them—that is, embers in a fi re will eventually be
choked by the ashes which cut off the embers’ oxygen
source. And like the embers, the speaker will eventu-
ally die.
The speaker sums up his lesson to the beloved by
indicating that, also paradoxically, the beloved’s love
will grow stronger as the lover ages because it is natu-
ral to “love that well which thou must leave ere long”
(l. 14). The speaker hopes the beloved will love him
more strongly because he will eventually die, mostSHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: SONNET 73 375