Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 Critical essay

Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 73’ is a poem that display’s the inevitability of death, which is a universal theme. It is about Shakespeare coming to terms that he is going to die and the different seasons of the year compare to the stages of the his life; Spring is when he is born and winter is his death. We start off during autumn, where he is gradually deteriorating, until we get into winter where he dies. A question that will be continually addressed is how Shakespeare portrays a universal theme and how his style effectively contributes to the main ideas of the poem. The poem’s structure is set in three quatrains and a rhyming couplet to conclude. It has a typical a, b, a, b rhyme scheme.
Sonnet 73 is a sonnet that is full of effective imagery. The effectiveness of the sonnet is heightened by its common images, such as fall, sunset, night and fire that are comprehensible to anybody who reads it. In the first quatrain Shakespeare al...