As autumn wanes into winter, the voice of the greatest of poets comes again to me. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.”
It’s not just the coming of winter, but also the accumulation of years. I will soon turn 79. William Shakespeare must have felt a similar melancholy when he wrote Sonnet 73.
Wonderfully crafted, Sonnet 73 is an appeal to the poet’s beloved, written in his later years. Setting the stage, so to speak, Shakespeare creates three scenes, one quatrain for each. The first is late fall. Most of the leaves are gone. Trees, where once birds sang, are “bare ruined choirs.”
The second is the sky just after the sun has gone down. A faint wash of color remains. For the third scene, the poet brings us indoors. He is now sitting by the hearth, before the “glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.”
This is what you see in me, he tells his beloved–the last fall colors, the fading sunset, the low flames of an almost-spent fire. Perceiving all this, the poet closes in a couplet, “makes thy love more strong.”
The sonnet ends with a call to his beloved “to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
So are we all called, as we turn the clocks back, as we approach yet another New England winter, to love well those around us, young and old.
Here, now, is Sonnet 73, a poem for the ages:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Ben Jacques Stories 