This most famous of the one hundred fifty-four sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) evokes, as we all know, both the sweet sadness of the year’s waning and the less-sweet sadness of our own prospective decline. The poem’s fourth line — “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” — is, if not the outright winner, at least a strong contender for the best poetic line ever rendered in English. Sonnet 73 illustrates, as well, why this Shakespearian sonnet form, also known as the “English sonnet,” came to be identified not with its originator, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), but with Shakespeare.

In the younger poet’s hands, this innovation on the Petrarchan sonnet form, first imported to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt, achieves a kind of exemplary perfection in its unstrained iambic pentameter. The meter is so self-effacingly regular that the substitutions that begin lines four and eight stand out in stark emphasis. We notice how bare and ruined the trees are, those empty choir stalls. Death, too, startles us, even in its lesser guise of sleep.

As the season draws to its close, the sonnet gains momentum through its three quatrains, continually upping its own stakes. Yes, yes, the speaker says, you’ll notice my autumn. You’ll notice, furthermore, my sunset, which signals the onset of night and sleep. Perhaps, alas, you’ll also notice the falling-to-ashes of various metaphorical fires. Perhaps you’ll consider that the more we live, the more we’re always dying. And — the couplet delivers the kicker — you’ll hold me close before you let me go.  

Sonnet 73 
by William Shakespeare 

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 ruin’d 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 up all in rest. 
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire 
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, 
As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by. 
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, 
To love that well which thou must leave ere long. 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.