Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Form and Meter
Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 is…a Shakespearean sonnet. Easy peasy, right?For those of you not up on the sonnet scoop, Shmoop's here to help. A sonnet's just a fancy term for a 14-line poem written in...
Speaker
In the first quatrain of the poem, the speaker sounds really depressed. His metaphor of the tree that has lost all its leaves makes it sound like he feels pretty hopeless about where he is in life....
Setting
In a sense, Sonnet 73 doesn't really have a setting. The speaker never tells you that he is standing in a particular place, or living at a particular time. Still, the speaker's mind does take us to...
What's Up With the Title?
To be perfectly honest, there's not much to make of a title like Sonnet 73. It's a sonnet, and it's number 73 in a sequence of 154 sonnets. It's just one of many. Nothing to it, right?Well, there i...
Calling Card
Like many of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sonnet 73 is preoccupied with problems of aging and death, and nothing much uplifting (except the love part, we guess). Of course, we have no idea of knowing whe...
Tough-o-Meter
Although not the easiest of Shakespeare's sonnets on a first reading, Sonnet 73 is close. The thought behind it is very universal and accessible (a guy getting old wants to make sure people still l...
Trivia
The great 20th century English poet and literary critic William Empson made a famous analysis of Sonnet 73 in his groundbreaking work Seven Types of Ambiguity. So while this sonnet may be one of Sh...
Steaminess Rating
No sex here. Just an old guy and his young love.
Allusions
Dissolution of the Monasteries (4): In a famous passage in his book Seven Types of Ambiguity, the English poet and critic William Empson argues that line 4 in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 refers to how...