After Rumi, I am staying with love but moving into English. This time, there is no translation between me and the poem.
I started with the poem alone, before listening to anyone read it or looking up its history.
The poem
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 ruined 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,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Before I read anything about it
Of course Shakespeare can recreate the fiery brightness of an autumn sunset. I picture trees with golden leaves in the foreground and a sun-streaked sky behind them.
I especially love the funeral imagery: the choir of birds and the bed of darkness swallowing the light.
Listening to the poem
I listened to Patrick Stewart read Sonnet 73. I could simply revel in his delivery of these lines. I can’t imagine adding anything that his rendering does not convey better.
What I learned
Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were published together in 1609, although some had been circulating privately since at least 1598. Sonnet 73 sits among several poems in which the speaker imagines his own death and what it will mean for the person he loves. In Sonnet 71, he asks to be forgotten after he dies. Here, he imagines his approaching death making that love stronger. Sonnet 74 then says that the body will die while something of him stays alive in the poem.
The person he is speaking to is unknown. Sonnet 73 belongs to the first 126 poems, traditionally said to be addressed to a young man sometimes called the “Fair Youth.” That is a convention rather than an identification, and the ageing man in the poem should not automatically be treated as literal autobiography.
The sonnet is built from three images of something approaching its end: first late autumn, then twilight, then a fire reduced to its final embers. The time left shrinks with each one, from part of a season, to a few hours, to the last moments before a fire goes out.
“Bare ruined choirs” may be more literal than I first realised. A choir is also the part of a church in which choristers sing. The bare branches can resemble the roofless choirs of monasteries ruined after Henry VIII dissolved them, while the absent birds take the place of singers who are no longer there. My first impression of funeral imagery was closer than I knew.
The fire carries the strangest idea. It lies on the ashes of its own youth and is finally “consumed with that which it was nourished by.” The fuel that kept it alive is also what it consumes on its way to extinction. The final couplet turns all three images back toward the beloved: knowing that something will be lost makes it more precious while it is still here.
Reading it again
There was imagery here that I had missed completely. The choir of birds may also be the choir of an actual church emptied of its choristers, and the dying fire may be a life being lived all the way to its completion.
That puts more of a chill into the poem than I felt on first reading.
The line or image I kept thinking about
It is autumn in California, and I like to go for runs in the morning. I know that I will not be able to look at overhanging branches, empty of birds, without seeing a ruined choir.