Sonnet 73

“Sonnet 73” can be interpreted in a few ways, but before discussing the possible interpretations, it is best to cover the poem’s undisputed themes and preoccupations.

In this poem, the speaker is concerned with aging and the effect aging has on love and perspective. To fully understand this idea, it’s useful to break the poem into four sections: the three quatrains and concluding couplet. Each quatrain introduces a new metaphor to better illustrate the feeling of aging, and the final couplet is the speaker’s reflection on the meaning and significance of those metaphors.

In the first quatrain, the speaker compares himself to a late fall or early winter day. The imagery here is full of death, including dying trees “shak[ing] against the cold” (Line 3) and the image of abandoned “choirs” (Line 4), or the songs of birds that no longer sing. Poets almost always associate winter with death as it is the season when everything dies and the world grows cold like a dead body. This opening metaphor is stark and bleak, setting the