A Shakespeare Sonnet

As a playwright, William Shakespeare’s reputation remains as strong as ever. Although bent toward the latest literary trends and a penchant for the cutting edge, some high school English departments no longer require teaching his plays in their English classes. Some universities and colleges have foolishly dropped Shakespeare as required reading for their English majors, yet his dramatic works continue to be widely read and performed by both professional and amateur artists worldwide. Besides being the world’s greatest dramatist, Shakespeare’s sonnets qualify him as one of the greatest lyric poets. Reading them, though challenging, is highly rewarding. Sonnet 73 is a good place to introduce a new reader to a journey worth traveling:

                            Sonnet 73 

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.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, excluding the ones he incorporated in some of his plays. As you read this Shakespearean or English sonnet, you will notice a structure that all his sonnets follow. It has four parts, three groups of four lines and two concluding lines. The four-line sections are called quatrains and the final two lines a couplet. This particular structure is named after Shakespeare, not because he invented the form, that credit goes to Henry Howard. When reading his sonnets, it is interesting to observe the ways in which Shakespeare varies and relates the contents of these “parts.”

In the first quatrain, the speaker addresses his beloved, “thou,” and depicts himself as old and nearing the end of his life. The imagery of the empty “boughs which shake against the cold” as “bare ruined choirs” is unambiguous. The music of youth has long left the speaker, and his physical state is frail. The quatrain’s effect is not necessarily tragic but certainly tinged with rueful sadness.

The second quatrain employs a second metaphor, one in which the speaker states that his beloved recognizes in him “the twilight of such day” after the sun has set. That “twilight” denotes unequivocally what the speaker only suggested in quatrain 1, that death is near and soon will arrive. The sorrow of the first quatrain has progressed and seems deeper and darker at this point in the poem.

Both quatrains 1 and 2 proceed along linear trajectories. Quatrain 1 intimates the process of youth to old age, from spring, summer, autumn and winter. Quatrain 2 measures time through the hours of a day, from morning to noon to afternoon, to sunset to twilight and finally into darkest night. In quatrain 1 one hears a note of nostalgia of those departed “sweet birds” along with the frailty of old age. Quatrain 2 positions the speaker nearer death yet also introduces a serene acceptance of final “rest”: “seals up all in rest.”

Whereas quatrains 1 and 2 follow similar linear formulations, quatrain 3 offer a different mode of change. The speaker now fashions his last metaphor into one of a dying fire. In quatrains 1 and 2, the speaker identifies with the image “bare ruined choirs,” and “black night” signify emptiness and darkest oblivion respectively, and it is time that impels the speaker into his old age of fragile limbs and toward “black night” of oblivion. In quatrain 3, he represents himself as a “glowing fire,” which is part of a continuous process that is a chemical rather than temporal process. Of course, this continuous process also denotes the change the speaker is experiencing. But in this metaphor of “ashes” and “glowing fire” he retains part of his essential vitality (“fire”) of who he is.

The declarative couplet that ties up the sonnet ascribes the thoughts that are traced through the quatrains directly to the beloved addressed by the speaker. As such, the beloved becomes a mirror of the speaker’s complex mind and the poem that offers a reflection of a relationship that spans 126 of the 154 sonnets.

This is just one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. His sonnets explore love, mortality, time, humor, lust, jealousy, and so on. Shakespeare was a master at characterization, which you will discover in his plays but also in his sonnets. In the next few posts, we will consider these themes while reading through a selection of Shakespeare’s works.