Camille Paglia is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson;
Sex, Art, and American Culture; and
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. She has also written
The Birds, a study of Alfred Hitchcock. She lives in Philadelphia.one
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 73
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 5
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, 10
As the deathbed 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.
The sonnet was a medieval form perfected by the Italian poet Petrarch, who was inspired by the courtly love tradition of southern France. From him, the fad of sonnet writing spread throughout Renaissance Europe. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey introduced the sonnet to England, though the style they favored was highly artificial and ridden with "conceits," showy metaphors that became clichés. Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser restored Petrarch's uid lyricism to the sonnet. But it was Shakespeare who rescued an exhausted romantic genre and made it a supple instrument of searching self-analysis. By treating the sonnet as a freestanding poem rather than a unit in a sonnet sequence, Shakespeare revolutionized poetry in the same way that Donatello, liberating the statue from its medieval architectural niche, revolutionized sculpture.
No writer before Shakespeare had packed more into a sonnet or any other short poem. Sonnet 73 has a tremendous range of reference and a fineness of observed detail. Shakespeare's mobile eye prefigures the camera. Love, the sonnet's original raison d'être, recedes for a melancholy survey of the human condition. The poem is interested less in individual suffering than in the relationship of microcosm to macrocosm--mankind's interconnection with nature.
Structurally, Sonnet 73 follows Surrey's format. In the Italian sonnet adapted by Wyatt, fourteen lines were divided into two quatrains (a quatrain is a set of four lines) and a sestet (six lines). The Elizabethan sonnet, afterward called the Shakespearean, used three quatrains and a couplet--two lines with the bite of an epigram. Shakespeare treats the three quatrains in Sonnet 73 like scenes from a play: each has its guiding metaphor, a variation on the main theme. These metaphors split off, in turn, into subordinate metaphors, to end each quatrain with a witty ourish. The insertion of "in me" to start each quatrain gives the poem immediacy and urgency and encourages us, whether justified or not, in identifying the speaker with the poet (1, 5, 9). The regular repetition of that phrase makes us hear and feel the poem's triple structure. "In me" operates like a stage cue, prompting the entrance of each metaphor from the wings.
In the first quatrain, man's life is compared to a "year" in a northern climate of dramatically changing seasons. The aging poet pinpoints his location on life's spectrum as the transition from maturity to old age, when autumn shifts to winter. The opening metaphor of "time" yields to a bleak image of man's body as a tree: the bare "boughs" shaken by the "cold" wind are like the weak limbs of an el
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