That Time of Year

      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
      As after sunset fadeth in the west;
      Which by and by black night doth take away,
      Death's second self, that seals all up in rest.
      In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
      That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
      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.

      -- William Shakespeare





      Beyond the Ordinary: An Appraisal of Shakespeare's "That Time of Year"

      Most sonnets in Shakespeare's day took the form of compliments to a loved one. The beauty, the virtue, the nobility of character, the various physical and/or moral perfections of the beloved -- these are the conventional themes of 16th Century English sonnets, and the sonneteer conventionally expresses these themes in fourteen iambic pentameter lines of elaborately rhymed and clever conceits (similes and metaphors). The reader can easily find dozens of such complimentary sonnets by Sidney, Spenser, Wyatt, Surrey, and other writers of that period. Even though Shakespeare's "That Time of Year" easily fits that conventional description, the richness of the figurative language and the intensity of situation and emotion raise this sonnet above the merely conventional level.

      What the speaker is complimenting in this case is a moral rather than a merely physical perfection, specifically, the beloved's loyal and genuine love for the speaker. A quick paraphrase of the sonnet makes the compliment quite clear:

      You can see that I am in the autumn or the evening of my life; and you can see that I am like a nearly burnt-out fire. You see and understand from all this that I will soon be gone, yet you continue to love me well. And that makes your obviously genuine love more valuable than ever to me.
      Besides the conventional compliment, the poem is clearly fourteen lines long, it clearly has a complex rhyme scheme, the meter is clearly iambic pentameter, and the three metaphors of autumn, evening, and fire clearly occupy all but two lines of the poem. In a few words, the poem clearly fits the conventional description of an ordinary Elizabethan sonnet, but don't we expect Shakespeare to be a bit better than ordinary?

      All three metaphors -- autumn, evening, and nearly burned-out fire -- are powerful emblems of approaching death, but in the autumn metaphor of the first four lines of the poem, one can really see the touch of a master poet:

      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 those four brief lines Shakespeare evokes a desolate picture of a long ago ravaged church or abbey, its roof caved in, its ruined choir lofts bared to the late autumn sky. Actually, in Shakespeare's time, such places were very familiar sights left over from the troubled days of the mid-1500's when many English churches were looted and/or burned by overly zealous crowds of religious reformers. In most pictures of such places one usually sees the stone crosses of the nearby cemetery. Inside and outside the damaged walls and rubble of such places, vines, weeds, and even small trees grow up. In spring there would be birds singing in those trees, but now the nearly bare branches "shake" or shiver like an old man in the cold wind of late fall in England. The "sweet birds" are no longer singing. Does the nearly bare tree suggest the Bard's famous bald head? Do the birds who are no longer singing suggest the poet's fear that his poetic powers have already begun to decline?

      Even more important, however, than Shakespeare's handling of metaphor in the poem is the intensity of emotion and situation in the sonnet. According to the 16th Century conventions of sonneteering, the poem is a compliment to the beloved, but the poem is also Shakespeare's serious meditation on the approach of extreme old age and death. The autumn metaphor suggests the fear and dread of losing one's mental powers; the evening metaphor suggests that the night is no longer for lovers but has become an depressing image of " Death's second self, that seals up all in rest"; and the fire metaphor suggests rather grimly that he is barely alive amidst "the ashes of his youth." All three images intensify the somber emotions that grow out of meditating upon one's own mortality. Also, the situation of an enforced separation of a lover from his beloved is always dramatically intense -- e.g., the lover must soon go off to war, or the lovers are forced apart by parents or social pressure or differences in rank, or the lover is kept apart from his beloved because the beloved cannot or will not return the lover's affection. However, the situation in Shakespeare's poem is even more intense because the separation by death will be permanent and irrevocable.

      It seems, therefore, that it is the emotional intensity of the poem and the brilliant handling of metaphor in the opening quatrain of the poem which raises this sonnet above the ordinary. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and we have the texts of several hundred other sonnets by contemporaries of Shakespeare. Only about twenty or twenty-five of the approximately 500 Elizabethan sonnets known to exist are ever regularly included in anthologies. "That Time of Year" is, and deserves to be, one of those chosen few.