Essay for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73

Anthony Tseng

Gloomy, dejected, depressed: These are the emotional elements that William Shakespeare implemented into the speaker of Sonnet 73. An understanding that time doesn’t last forever and we all will age with the current of time. Thus he has accepted his fate, but wants us the readers to feel what he feels and see what he sees.

Each year more time passes by. Each year we age a little more. A year also dies out, and then comes a new year. An endless cycle of life and death. Represented each year by trees with yellow leaves. This is how the speaker has aged. Aged so much that “few do hang.” Those leaves are the very strands of life a person has in this world. It’s why people hold so dearly to the people they love, so they won’t lose them. But there’s always the last fork in the road, and that is death. No matter how strong a person is or determined, death will bring one’s downfall. He will be shaken to death by the strong cold wind. How cold it is to die old while the person you love is young. How he must die before someone he loves. It's a feeling of hopelessness, but a feeling that is dispelled by the “sweet birds” songs. Songs sang by his lover. Conversations that bring the essence of life back into him. What more can one have, than for a person that cares.

Without friends and family, solitude will blow the “dim light,” final gasp for life. Just like the sun setting in the west, an end to the term of life. It’s something we see every day, the setting of sun in the west. Thus our life has been represented by our every day life, day as our life, night as our death. It’s something inescapable; it’s something so simple. Death will surround us in an envelope, just like the beautiful dark night that overlaps the bright day.

The night will suffocate his fire, his life. The speaker sees this as the inevitable. Something he can’t avoid, even if you could find medicinal products to prolong his lifespan. There’s still only one route he can take in the end, and that is death.

The one road left, leaves only the speakers choice of a slow death. Little by little the very few remnants of the “glowing of the such fire” dies out. Just like the few leafs that hang upon a tree during late fall and early winter.