Sonnet 73

Devouring Time

1 That time of year thou mayst in me behold
2 When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
3 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
4 Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
5 In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
6 As after sunset fadeth in the west;
7 Which by and by black night doth take away,
8 Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
9 In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
10 That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
11 As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
12 Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
13 This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
14 To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Notes

TLN 1009rhetorical device
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”
The poet opens with the first of three sustained comparisons for his own aging: late autumn, twilight, and a dying fire. Each of the three quatrains introduces a new image, and each tightens the sense of approaching extinction. The repetition of 'In me thou see'st' at lines 5 and 9 drives the sequence forward and keeps the beloved as the observer throughout. This triple-metaphor structure is a classical device called tricolon, here adapted to the sonnet's three-quatrain form.
historical The sonnet form
TLN 1012historical topical
“Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”
A 'choir' is the chancel of a church — the section where the choir sang the daily offices. After Henry VIII dissolved the English monasteries between 1536 and 1541, more than 800 religious houses were stripped of their lead roofing and left roofless and open to the sky. Their bare stone vaults, once filled with choral singing, were a common sight across the English countryside throughout the late sixteenth century. The poet fuses the bare winter branches with those empty stone arches: both are stripped, silent, and a record of what was.
TLN 1017rhetorical device
“glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie”
The third quatrain's image of a fire dying on its own ash is a paradox: the fuel that fed the fire has become the ash that smothers it, so what nourished life is now what extinguishes it. 'His' here means 'its' (the fire's own); 'expire' means both to go out — as a flame expires when it exhausts its fuel — and to breathe one's last breath, since 'expire' comes from Latin exspirare, to breathe out. The dying fire is simultaneously the poet's aging body and the consumed fuel of youth.
TLN 1019archaic vocab
“As the death-bed, whereon it must expire”
'Expire' means both to go out (as a fire exhausts its fuel) and to breathe one's last and die, from Latin exspirare, 'to breathe out.' The word applies simultaneously to the fire and to the poet: the fire expires on its ash-bed and the poet expires on his death-bed. The 'death-bed' in this line is literally the bed of ash on which the dying embers rest, and figuratively the poet's own deathbed.