“That time of year thou mayst in me behold” Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 as an exercise on the metaphorization of a single object.
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare has been often cited as one of the most prominent poems in the Early Modern Tradition, due to the complexity of its images and the emblematic characteristics of its quatrains. The sonnet itself, deals with the subject of aging and the passing of time; it is a marvellous example of the metaphorization of a single object through various scopes. The poem treats with the anxiety experimented by the voice which realizes on the rapid process of aging and develops the theme by the use of several metaphors which slowly increase their level of complexity, to the degree that at the end of the third quatrain, it is almost impossible to point at a specific moment in which something transforms into something different. The speaker of the poem, which has been claimed by some scholars to be the older poet speaking to the younger poet, happens to be quite difficult to locate, as the poem begins with an apostrophe, in which the voice addresses someone else. “That