Sonnet 73 Death Quotes

So, which attitude do you think the speaker prefers: (a) age gracefully, or (b) rage, rage against the dying of the light? Uh, yeah, definitely not option (a). These lines make it clear that the speaker thinks growing old totally stinks, and makes him feel like a tree shaking its barren boughs "against the cold." Don't you think it's interesting that the speaker isn't even clear about how old he is (just look at all that bandying back and forth about how many leaves there are on the tree)? Couldn't this just make his statement in line 3 that much grimmer—i.e. once you're past a certain age, it doesn't really matter, you're just facing down the grim, cold, wintry specter of death anyhow?

What do you think—could those "sweet birds" stand for some bodacious babes (of unspecified sex) who used to hang on his arm? We think it's possible. That said, perhaps the most notable thing in this line is the word "late," which is an old-fashioned way of saying "lately." By putting this word into the line, the speaker shows his surprise at how quickly old age has caught up with him. It seems like his glory days of living large and loving were only yesterday—and now he's left with the hangover of being, well, old.

In some ways, the idea behind the imagery in lines 5-6 is similar to that in line 4—because both of them call attention to how recently the speaker was young. Oddly enough, the lingering afterburn of the speaker's youth here (the light that is still left after the sun has set) might be even more depressing than the imagery of the birds in line 4. After all, at least the birds were a pure memory of good times, whereas this leftover sunlight is a weaker, dimmer, more wasted version of what went before. Mortality's a bummer alright.

On the whole, these lines seem to continue quatrain 2's emphasis on the grim inevitability of death. Of course, depending on how you read the word "rest" at the end of line 8, these lines could also be holding out a little sliver of hope about the afterlife. That's because the word "rest" might point to the traditional Christian idea of the dead people slumbering in their graves until Judgment Day comes around and they get up and ascend to Heaven (or descend to Hell). The problem with this interpretation is that, technically speaking, the word "rest" here refers to what "black night" brings on, and "black night" is described as being like "Death," but not Death itself (it is death's "second self"). Putting this analogy in SAT form, it looks like that "black night" is to "rest" as "Death" is to, well, "being dead." Yeah, maybe these lines really aren't that comforting after all.

Quatrain 3 continues the death theme, but seems to shift the emphasis subtly. Instead of concentrating on Death as an external force coming to snuff out life, these lines put the emphasis on how life continues to endure—so that it only ends when it uses itself up. In a way, these lines can be read as the speaker thumbing his nose at mortality.

The very end of the poem continues in the same emotional direction that was started in quatrain 3: defiance. Here, it's almost as if the speaker is saying, "Yeah, sure, Death, you think you're so tough. But you know what? That's just going to make me and my lover cherish each other all the more. Sucks to be you."