Sonnet73 backcompat

Editor's Notes

1. Sonnet’s Argument: The speaker’s vitality is diminishing as he nears the end of his life. The addressee’s love for the speaker (referred to as “thou”) therefore increases in anticipation of the speaker’s absence. Rhetorical Structure: Each quatrain develops a metaphor for the speaker’s impending death. The progression of metaphors in the three quatrains symbolizes the speaker’s increasing urgency as death grows closer: first, he conceptualizes his life as a full year, then as a full day, then as the minutes during which a fire burns. If time is the antagonist of the first three quatrains, the final heroic couplet presents love as the unexpected savior of the sonnet.
2. This quatrain introduces the first of three metaphors that the speaker develops to illustrate the threshold between life and death. “That time of year” refers to both the season of late autumn and the speaker’s final stage of life. The speaker’s seemingly indecisive description of “yellow leaves, or none, or few” suggests that he places himself between life (“yellow leaves”) and death (“none”) by settling on “a few.” The “boughs which shake against the cold” reflect his own struggle against death (when his body will lose its warmth).
3. This quatrain provides a variation on the opening verse by presenting another natural image of a limited time period. While the opening lines concern the transition between autumn and winter, the second quatrain describes the “twilight” period between evening and nighttime, “after sunset fadeth”. Like late autumn and the speaker’s vitality, the twilight is fleeting. The night’s darkness “seals up all in rest” as a coffin is sealed or as a corpse’s eyelids are sealed. However, unlike the permanence of a human’s death, the nighttime represents a temporary absence of light/life; it is therefore a variation on death, “Death’s second self”.
4. While the first two quatrains present images of cyclical deaths (which promise subsequent rebirths), the third quatrain’s metaphor illustrates the speaker’s death with greater finality. The “glowing”—rather than burning—of the “fire” nears its own extinction as it rests “on the ashes of his youth”; the speaker’s youth has already passed, and soon his mortal life will “expire” as well. The fire, like the speaker, is “consumed with that which it was nourish’d by” as both are created and destroyed over time : a fire begins with a spark and grows over time then slowly fades; a person begins as a baby and grows over time then slowly dies.
5. The speaker concludes that his own withering state “makes thy love more strong,/To love that well which thou must leave ere long”. This proclamation is a variation on the notion that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” In this case, it’s the anticipation of absence, the transitional period between possessing and losing, that the speaker’s lover experiences affection at its strongest.