Sonnet 73

“Sonnet 73” can be interpreted in a few ways, but before discussing the possible interpretations, it is best to cover the poem’s undisputed themes and preoccupations.

In this poem, the speaker is concerned with aging and the effect aging has on love and perspective. To fully understand this idea, it’s useful to break the poem into four sections: the three quatrains and concluding couplet. Each quatrain introduces a new metaphor to better illustrate the feeling of aging, and the final couplet is the speaker’s reflection on the meaning and significance of those metaphors.

In the first quatrain, the speaker compares himself to a late fall or early winter day. The imagery here is full of death, including dying trees “shak[ing] against the cold” (Line 3) and the image of abandoned “choirs” (Line 4), or the songs of birds that no longer sing. Poets almost always associate winter with death as it is the season when everything dies and the world grows cold like a dead body. This opening metaphor is stark and bleak, setting the mood up as depressing and setting the poem up as a reflection on loss and death.

The second quatrain compares the speaker to a dying day, again providing a vivid comparison between the speaker and death. The metaphor echoes a classic riddle from the Greek playwright Sophocles in the play Oedipus Rex. In the play, the sphinx’s riddle asks what creature crawls on four legs in the morning, walks on two in the afternoon, and walks on three in the evening. The answer is man, who crawls as a baby, walks as an adult, and walks with a cane as an old man. Shakespeare is focusing on this concept of aging: the progression of the day mimics the progression of a person’s life. In this sense, the evening represents the “twilight” (Line 5) of a person’s life as they prepare for sleep in the dark night, which according to Shakespeare, is “Death’s second self” (Line 8). Like the first quatrain, this section adds a feeling of despair and finality to the poem, which might seem odd considering Shakespearean sonnets are typically associated with love.

The third quatrain is the most complex, but on its surface, it follows the logic of the first two metaphors. Shakespeare compares growing old to a dying fire. As the fire dies, so does the man. Once the fire dies, all warmth and light ceases, similar to how warmth ceases with winter (quatrain one) and light ceases with night (quatrain two). However, the last three lines of this quatrain complicate the image, adding in the source of the flame that is dissipating. Shakespeare writes that the dying fire lies upon the “ashes of […] youth” (Line 10), and those ashes are the “death-bed” (Line 11) where the body will ultimately rest. The quatrain concludes with the idea that the flame will consume the ashes that once “nourish’d” (Line 12) it. The idea here is that youth is the spark that lights aging, but as one ages more, that initial spark will eventually burn out, leading to death, just as a fire burns and consumes its initial spark while spitting out that initial fuel in the form of ashes. This quatrain introduces a relationship between age and youth that was not present in the first two quatrains, thus setting up the couplet.

The combination of the third quatrain and the final couplet serves as the volta of the sonnet, which is the traditional point in a sonnet where the theme takes an unexpected turn compared to what came before. The turn here is from the bleakness of the opening metaphors to the wisdom of the final couplet. In this couplet, Shakespeare again addresses the Fair Youth, giving him advice about love and aging. However, this couplet can be interpreted in two ways, and depending on the interpretation the reader chooses, this poem’s message changes.

The first interpretation is that the speaker is encouraging the Fair Youth to love him more because he is aging. In this interpretation, the speaker wants the Fair Youth to love “that well which thou must leave ere long” (Line 14), meaning the speaker. Because the speaker will die soon, the Fair Youth should love him and appreciate him more.

The second interpretation is that the speaker is encouraging the Fair Youth to appreciate youth more, and this is a lesson only someone who has lost youth can truly know. In this interpretation, the speaker wants the Fair Youth to love “that well which thou must leave ere long” (Line 14), meaning the Fair Youth’s own youth.

If a reader chooses the first interpretation, then the preceding metaphors become more beautiful because they signify the Fair Youth’s love for someone. If a reader chooses the second interpretation, then the preceding metaphors become more depressing as they represent what will ultimately happen to the beauty of the Fair Youth, and by extension, the beauty of all people’s youth.

Either interpretation is valid, and Shakespeare makes no attempt to favor one interpretation over the other. This interpretive flexibility is one of the reasons why the poem has endured for so long.