Sonnet 73.
Shakespeare's sonnet # 73 is written in the Shakespearean sonnet style consisting of three quatrains .
and one couplet.Each quatrain,written in iambic pentameter has it's own rhyme scheme;rhyming in .
alternating lines.The couplet usually summarizes the preceeding twelve lines.
In Sonnet 73 one will realize Shakespeare follows the classic pattern of the iambic pentameter with a .
slight variation; the poet utilizes the "spondaic foot" or heavey stress in the beginning of the fourth .
line in each of the quatrains. (quatrain 1 "Bare ruined choirs." , quatrain 2 "Death's second." , quatrain.
3"Consumed with."). To further change the pace of the poem, the author employs pauses or caesuras to.
convey a sense of aging and slowing of life ; creating an association with death.
Sonnet 73 contains multiple parallels to death and the speaker gives the impression that he is near .
death and is reflecting on his past life.
In the first quatrain, the poet uses the autumn season as a metephore for his progression in years; for.
as autumn progresses the leaves are " yellow, or none, or few,".The tree, personified as an aging man,.
leaves the reader with an image of a frail older man whose body is weakened and shivering with age.
( "Upon those boughs which shake against the cold").
"Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." suggests a bare ,desolate place, empty of people,.
filled with decay and despair, much like the doom and gloom the poet feels in the late autumn of his life.
In the second quatrain Shakespeare uses the day in the passage of time comparing his stage of life to .
that of " the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west,".Black night is personified as a taker .
of time untill finally Death's alter ego takes what time is left. It is important to note; the poet has changed.
his focus from aging, to dying, to death and narrowed his scope to the close of one day.