The Death of Creative Power in Sonnet 73 Essay - 1072 Words

The Death of Creative Power in Sonnet 73nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; Most of the 127 sonnets Shakespeare wrote to one of his close male friends are united by the theme of the overwhelming, destructive power of time, and the counterbalancing power of love and poetry to create and preserve beauty. Sonnet 73 is no different, but it does present an intriguing twist on this theme. Most of these sonnets address the youth and beauty of his male friend, as well as poetrys power to immortalize them, but number 73 addresses the authors own mortality and the friends love for him. Also, subtly woven into this turning inward is a lament that the creative vitality represented by the poems themselves is fading†¦show more content†¦. ./ When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold (1-3). This is a straightforward complaint that, like autumn, the poet is moving gradually into old age, with the winter of death right around the corner. But Shakespeares description of the tree limbs in their bare autumn dress is ke y to the whole poem. He calls them Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. The barren tree branches are the choir, or the place where the choir sang. But the sweet birds are no longer there. Given that the entire sequence of poems is a sequence of songs, Shakespeares lament can be seen as a lament that the songs themselves, the poems, will cease. He was one of the sweet birds, or his poems were. At his death, no longer will there be any new songs to praise his friend. The next quatrain lapses into a more mundane metaphor. The seeming proximity of sleep and death has long been a subject of English poetry. One noteworthy aspect of the metaphor here, though, is that Shakespeare doesnt use death to meditate on the melancholy aspect of sleep, but uses sleep to speculate on the restful aspect of death. The image which opens the quatrain, the sunset, is standard; his life is at the point of fading into darkness. But the sleep which night brings is not presented too fearfully here, because night brings Deaths second self that seals up all inShow MoreRelatedWilliam Wordsworth: A study of his poetry and its reflection of Romanticism Who is William Wordsworth? Why is he called a Romantic poet? How does his poetry reflect Romanticism?5604 Words   |  23 Pagesinextricable link between Wordsworth the man and Wordsworth the poet, the poems discussed in this paper have been separated into three sections. The first section will deal with poems from the Lyrical Ballads. The second section explores Wordsworths Sonnets. 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