Analyse
Shakespeare’s “That time of year Thou may’st in me behold”.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 mainly focuses on the
use of metaphor to aid his audience in thoroughly understanding the meaning of
each of the three quatrains. Richard B. Hovey utterly believes that "in
Sonnet 73 the poet-narrator compares his state with three things: autumn, the
passing of day, and the burning out of a fire. To each of these comparisons
Shakespeare devotes a quatrain, a quatrain which develops a
metaphor". Therefore, although believed to be one of Shakespeare's
well-known sonnets, Sonnet 73 has had numerous comments, with different
perspectives on its significance, as well as its addressee.
Barbara Estermann discusses William
Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 in relation to the beginning of the Renaissance. She
argues that the speaker of Sonnet 73 is comparing himself to the universe
through his transition from "the physical act of aging to his final act of
dying, and then to his death". Esterman clarifies that throughout the
three quatrains of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, the speaker "demonstrates
man's relationship to the cosmos and the parallel properties which ultimately
reveal his humanity and his link to his to the universe. Shakespeare thus
compares the fading of his youth through the three elements of the universe:
the fading of life, the fading of the light, and the dying of the fire".
