“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 time of year thou mayst in me behold” reads the poem, where a first person speaker tells the other what the other thinks of the I, this reminds us of a mirror-like reflection, as if the voice was speaking to that other who is his reflection across the looking glass, as if the voice was looking at a mirror and realizing of his own aging process.

Along the first quatrain, the speaker describes his aging process as autumn, that time of year “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold”. This image establishes a relationship between the loss of hair due to aging and the way in which trees lose their leaves. The representation of mature age as autumn represents life as cycle coming to an end, which produces the illusion of life being cyclical as a year, where death is not perceived as a definite ending, instead, the lack of awareness of death, typical of those who, although not young, have not realized their death is nothing but sure. However, the loss of youth is something which is evidently implied in the stanza, as the branches of the trees are described as “Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” This image reminds us of the church choirs where children sing, such choirs that have been abandoned as the children have grown up, in the same way that birds have flown away their nest. This, together with the loss of the fire of passion, embodied by the cold against which the empty boughs shake, represents the reaching of a mature age.

The second quatrain narrows the spectrum from the wider time period of a season to the briefer moment of twilight, shifting the temperature movement to an increase in darkness. Along the lines of this quatrain, daylight is slowly fading away into darkness, in a much more radical way that in the previous section. This implies a movement from longer time periods to shorter ones, as now we are not dealing with months or weeks, but with the hours and minutes it takes for the day to fade away into the night time, which is described as “Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.” The movement from day into night implies not only the rest that humans look for when sleeping, but the metaphorical process of resting forever; in that sense, every night death visit us and takes a little of our lives away, preparing us for the greater and final rest. This stanza, in contrast with the first quatrain, implies a shift from a larger cycle leaning towards its end, to the final minutes of a binary cycle, it does moves from a long and easy to divide sequence, into a much more specific moment, where there are only two possibilities, that of light and that of darkness.

The third quatrain of the poem is where things begin to change in a more abrupt fashion, as we find ourselves into a much more complex situation than that of autumn and twilight. Here, the voice portrays the image of a glowing ember lying on the ashes of a fire which was consumed by that same fuel it was nourished by. In the same way, the life and strength of the speaker has been consumed by the same vitality and passion that nourished his life in the first place, and now the bed of ashes created by his own burning will serve as dead bed; life is extinguished when the strength of youth dies. The image, shifts from the wider time span of the moment of twilight to the almost impossible to pin down moment in which something passes from being burning to being burnt. In that way, the speaker moves from the static to the dynamic, to a point where the movement from one moment to another is barely impossible to point at. The movement from each quatrain to the other is a shift from what appears to be a static image, represented by a highly visual description of autumn, a gentle representation of maturity, to the much more detailed and dynamic visualization of an extinguishing fire. The effect created by this movement is that of a zooming motion from the general to the specific, from the vast to the narrow.

The exercise on metaphorization that the poem represents is by no means simple; it is the product of the detailed and dynamic reconstruction of the aging process and the developing maturity of the speaker, increasing in each quatrain the speed in which the inevitability of death is realized. The poem portrays the process of aging and the acceptance of impermanence by creating a transition from the static to the dynamic, a metonymic transition into that which cannot be pinned down or explained but by the elements that it is composed by. The gentle image of the leaning towards the end of a cycle which implies renewal moves towards a much more radical shift from day to night, from the light to the darkness and rest that “death’s second self” implies, a binary logic that is then taken to the last image, that in which the moment between something burning and something being burnt occurs, the division of each element of the binary logic.

Prof. Alejandro Abogado