In the second qutrain of the poem, Shakespeare tells us that love doesn’t change with the time. “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks, within his bending sickle’s compass come”. It doesn’t change, even though people get older and lose their “rosy lips and cheeks”, their beauty.
Even he, the Death, will come love will come trough, “love alters not” with Death’s “brief hours and weeks”, meaning a week in Deaths time beginning a lifetime in ours. Love will “bear out…to the edge of doom”.
The last quatrain is a very powerful one, “If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor man ever loved”. He is actually saying if what I have wrote is wrong, and you can prove it, then I never wrote it and no man has ever loved. This however is impossible and is ironic as you, the reader, have just read it do it has to be true.
Sonnet 73
The unsiversal message is live to life to the full – You only get it once so, you had better make the most of it, or even the love of life is stronger, now that death is nearer.
The first qutrain of Shakespeare’s sonnet contains a great deal of imganery referring to nature. He compares aging process to the “ yellow leaves” of winter when “none, or few do hang”
In the second qutrain the period of time is shorter. The first one began with the akte autum or winter, but now it has changed to day/nigth. “ In me thou sest the twilight of such day” and “Which is soon extinguished by black night”. He describes, how he feels of his oncoming death, or the death of his youth, caomparing it with the sunset.
In the third quatrain, the time span has decreased once again, in being a fire. “In me thou seest the glowing of such fire, that on ashes of his youth doth lie, as the death-bed whereupon it must be expire, consume’d with that wich it was nourish’d by.” In this four lines, Shakespeare is comparing death to a fire, but not just death, but the death of his youth. He compares it with the glwowing embers wich lies upon the ashes remaining from the flame of his youth. The fire is metaphorically for his youth.
The image of the fire consumed by the ashes of it’s youth is significant both for its brilliant, disposite of the past - the aches eventually snuff out the fire, “consumed by that which nourished by” – and fot the fact that when the fire is extinguishe,it can never be lit again.
The sonnet ends with a deceptively simple rhyming couplet. The first word of this couplet refers of the poet’s youth nad passion. The couptel renwes the speaker’ plea for the young man’s love, urging him to “love well” that which he must son leave.
Shakespeare may have written this poem for a close friend as he uses the wod “thou” which indicates that he had known the person very well.
It seems as if Shakespeare wrote this poem to prepare the reader, not for the approaching literal death of his body, but for the metaphorical death of his youth and passion. The friend he is talking muste be a lot younger than he.
Another aspect of the poem is the diminution of the time concept, qutrain by qutrain. First a year, and the final session of it, then only a day, and the stretch of it; then just a fire, built for the part of the day; and the final minutes of it.
When you compare these two sonnets, both sonnets are using love in comparison to death and both sonnets give us a imige that ist natrual. They are both about love and that love doesn’t change with the time, it is even stronger.
Judith Hollmann, Lower 6th
