“Sonnet No 73”

1 Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 1 English Hons., Paper-2 Topic: Sonnet No. 73 Lecture No: 46 By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117 “SONNET NO 73” ‘THAT TIME OF YEAR THOU MAYST IN ME BEHOLD’ INTRODUCTION • "All now agree that the Sonnets are a collection of almost matchless interest, a legacy from Shakespeare at once strange and precious, -- nothing less, in fact, than a preserved series of metrical condensations, weighty and compact as so many gold nuggets, of thoughts and feelings that were once in his mind. The interpretations of them collectively, however, the theories of their nature and purport collectively, differ widely," remarked, David Masson. 2 • In the Sonnets "Shakespeare expresses his own feelings in his own person," said Wordsworth emphatically; and he added: "In no part of the writings of this number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed." • Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, likely composed over an extended period from 1592 to 1598, the year in which Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's "sugred sonnets": “The witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c.” • In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's sonnets, no doubt without the author's permission, along with Shakespeare's long poem, The Passionate Pilgrim. • The first 126 sonnets were dedicated to a W. H., whose identity remains a mystery, although William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, is frequently suggested because Shakespeare's First Folio (1623) was also dedicated to him, and the last 28 are either addressed to, or refer to a woman-the Dark Lady. • The sonnets cover such themes as the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and mortality. THEME • Sonnet 73 contains many of the themes common throughout the entire body of sonnets, including the ravages of time on one's physical well-being and the mental anguish associated with moving further from youth and closer to death. Throughout the 126 sonnets addressed to the young man the poet tries repeatedly to impart his 3 wisdom of Time's wrath, and more specifically, the sad truth that time will have the same effects on the young man as it has upon the poet. • The poet is preparing his young friend, not for the approaching literal death of his body, but the metaphorical death of his youth and passion. SUMMARY • In this poem, the speaker invokes a series of metaphors to characterize the nature of what he perceives to be his old age. In the first quatrain, he tells the beloved that his age is like a “time of year,” late autumn, when the leaves have almost completely fallen from the trees, and the weather has grown cold, and the birds have left their branches. • In the second quatrain, he then says that his age is like late twilight, “As after sunset fadeth in the west,” and the remaining light is slowly extinguished in the darkness, which the speaker likens to “Death’s second self.” • In the third quatrain, the speaker compares himself to the glowing remnants of a fire, which lies “on the ashes of his youth”—that is, on the ashes of the logs that once enabled it to burn—and which will soon be consumed “by that which it was nourished by”—that is, it will be extinguished as it sinks into the ashes, which its own burning created. 4 • In the couplet, the speaker tells the young man that he must perceive these things, and that his love must be strengthened by the knowledge that he will soon be parted from the speaker when the speaker, like the fire, is extinguished by time. ANALYSIS: • Sonnet 73 takes up one of the most pressing issues of the first 126 sonnets, the speaker’s anxieties regarding what he perceives to be his advanced age, and develops the theme through a sequence of metaphors each implying something different. The first quatrain, which employs the metaphor of the winter day, emphasizes the harshness and emptiness of old age, with its boughs shaking against the cold and its “bare ruined choirs” bereft of birdsong. In the second quatrain, the metaphor shifts to that of twilight, and emphasizes not the chill of old age, but rather the gradual fading of the light of youth, as “black night” takes away the light “by and by”. • But in each of these quatrains, with each of these metaphors, the speaker fails to confront the full scope of his problem: both the metaphor of winter and the metaphor of twilight imply cycles, whereas old age is final. Winter follows spring, but spring will follow winter just as surely; and after the twilight fades, dawn will come again. In human life, however, the fading of warmth and light is not cyclical; youth will not come again for the speaker. • In the third quatrain, he must resign himself to this fact. The image of the fire consumed by the ashes of its youth is significant both for its brilliant disposition of the past—the ashes of which eventually snuff out the fire, “consumed by that which it was nourished by”—and for the fact that when the fire is extinguished, it can never be lit again. 5 CONCLUSION • In this sense, Sonnet 73 is more complex than it is often considered supposed by critics and scholars. It is often argued that 73 and sonnets like it are simply exercises in metaphor—that they propose a number of different metaphors for the same thing, and the metaphors essentially mean the same thing. But to make this argument is to miss the psychological narrative contained within the choice of metaphors themselves. • Sonnet 73 is not simply a procession of interchangeable metaphors; it is the story of the speaker slowly coming to grips with the real finality of his age and his impermanence in time. *** By:Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117 .

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