Sonnet:- 75

Sonnets 71-74 are typically analyzed as a group, linked by the poet's thoughts of his own
mortality. However, 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. Time's destruction
of great monuments juxtaposed with the effects of age on human beings is a convention
seen before, most notably in Sonnet 55.
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. The poet's deep insecurities swell
irrepressibly as he concludes that the young man is now focused only on the signs of his
aging -- as the poet surely is himself. This is illustrated by the linear development of the
three quatrains. The first two quatrains establish what the poet perceives the young man
now sees as he looks at the poet: those yellow leaves and bare boughs, and the faint
afterglow of the fading sun. The third quatrain reveals that the poet is speaking not of his
impending physical death, but the death of his youth and subsequently his youthful
desires -- those very things which sustained his relationship with the young man.
Throughout the 126 sonnets addressed to the young man the poet tries repeatedly to
impart his 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. And as we see in the
concluding couplet of Sonnet 73, the poet has this time succeeded. The young man now
understands the importance of his own youth, which he will be forced to 'leave ere long'
(14).
It must be reiterated that some critics assume the young man 'perceives' not the future
loss of his own youth, but the approaching loss of the poet, his dear friend. This would
then mean that the poet is speaking of his death in the literal sense. Feuillerat argues that
Even if we make allowance for the exaggeration which is every poet's right, Shakespeare
was not young when he wrote this sonnet. It is overcast by the shadow of death and
belongs to a date perhaps not far from 1609. (The Composition of Shakespeare's Plays, p.
72)
This interpretation is less popular because it is now generally accepted that all 154
sonnets were composed before 1600, so Shakespeare would have been no older than
thirty-six. However, the sonnets were not initially printed in the order we now accept them,
and an error in sequence is very possible.
Sonnet 73 is one of Shakespeare's most famous works, but it has prompted both
tremendous praise and sharp criticism. Included here are excerpts from commentaries by
two noted Shakespearean scholars, John Barryman and John Crowe Ransom:
The fundamental emotion [in Sonnet 73] is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What
renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the
time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and the final season of it; then

only a day, and the stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of the day, and the final
minutes of it; then -- entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even now a merely objective
"that," like a third-person corpse! -- the poet. The imagery begins and continues as visual
-- yellow, sunset, glowing -- and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first
quatrain one heard sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every
kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous
statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire,
makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final immediate triumph of the poem's
imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed
invoked -- that the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Henry's reign,
where 'late' -- not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem
-- the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming -as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem knows. Instinct is here, after all, a
kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English.
(John Berryman, The Sonnets)
*****
The structure is good, the three quatrains offering distinct yet equivalent figures for the
time of life of the unsuccessful and to-be-pitied lover. But the first quatrain is the boldest,
and the effect of the whole is slightly anti-climactic. Within this quatrain I think I detect a
thing which often characterizes Shakespeare's work within the metaphysical style: he is
unwilling to renounce the benefit of his earlier style, which consisted in the breadth of the
associations; that is, he will not quite risk the power of a single figure but compounds the
figures. I refer to the two images about the boughs. It is one thing to have the boughs
shaking against the cold, and in that capacity they carry very well the fact of the old
rejected lover; it is another thing to represent them as ruined choirs where the birds no
longer sing. The latter is a just representation of the lover too, and indeed a subtler and
richer one, but the two images cannot, in logical rigor, co-exist. Therefore I
deprecate shake against the cold. And I believe everybody will deprecate sweet. This term
is not an objective image at all, but a term to be located at the subjective pole of the
experience; it expects to satisfy a feeling by naming it (this is, by just having it) and is a
pure sentimentalism.
(John Crowe Ransom, Shakespeare at Sonnets).