1. Sonnet 73 William Shakespeare
Year 13
English Language and Literature
LP1: Component 1 Section A: Poetry
Sonnet 73 William Shakespeare

2. Learning objectives: Learning Outcomes: Literacy Objective
To analyse how meanings are shaped in texts, including how variations in language,
form and context shape and change meanings.
Learning objectives:
To be able to write an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 using appropriate terminology AO1) and contextual factors (AO4) to support my understanding.
Learning Outcomes:
A capital letter must begin every sentence.
All proper nouns must begin with a capital letter.
Literacy Objective

3. Assessment Objectives
A-Level English Exam
Component 1 Poetry The question requires candidates to select poetry from the anthology, and make connections between their selected poetry and a previously unseen text printed on the examination paper. In preparation for the unseen text in this examination, learners will need to read a range of texts published post-1914, including post-1914 poetry, prose fiction, drama and non-literary texts.
Assessment Objectives
This section assesses AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO4.
Today’s lesson
Revising terminology and how to analyse texts.

4. An overview of Shakespeare’s sonnets
Although Shakespeare's sonnets can be divided into different sections numerous ways, the most apparent division involves Sonnets 1–126, in which the poet strikes up a relationship with a young man, and Sonnets 127–154, which are concerned with the poet's relationship with a woman, variously referred to as the Dark Lady, or as his mistress.
In the first large division, Sonnets 1–126, the poet addresses an alluring young man with whom he has struck up a relationship. In Sonnets 1–17, he tries to convince the handsome young man to marry and beget children so that the youth's incredible beauty will not die when the youth dies. Starting in Sonnet 18, when the youth appears to reject this argument for procreation, the poet glories in the young man's beauty and takes consolation in the fact that his sonnets will preserve the youth's beauty, much like the youth's children would.
By Sonnet 26, perhaps becoming more attached to the young man than he originally intended, the poet feels isolated and alone when the youth is absent. He cannot sleep. Emotionally exhausted, he becomes frustrated by what he sees as the youth's inadequate response to his affection. The estrangement between the poet and the young man continues at least through Sonnet 58 and is marked by the poet's fluctuating emotions for the youth: One moment he is completely dependent on the youth's affections, the next moment he angrily lashes out because his love for the young man is unrequited.
Despondent over the youth's treatment of him, desperately the poet views with pain and sorrow the ultimate corrosion of time, especially in relation to the young man's beauty. He seeks answers to the question of how time can be defeated and youth and beauty preserved. Philosophising about time preoccupies the poet, who tells the young man that time and immortality cannot be conquered; however, the youth ignores the poet and seeks other friendships, including one with the poet's mistress (Sonnets 40–42) and another with a rival poet (Sonnets 79–87). Expectedly, the relationship between the youth and this new poet greatly upsets the sonnets' poet, who lashes out at the young man and then retreats into despondency, in part because he feels his poetry is lacklustre and cannot compete with the new forms of poetry being written about the youth. Again, the poet fluctuates between confidence in his poetic abilities and resignation about losing the youth's friendship.

5. Philosophically examining what love for another person entails, the poet urges his friend not to postpone his desertion of the poet — if that is what the youth is ultimately planning. Break off the relationship now, begs the poet, who is prepared to accept whatever fate holds. Ironically, the more the youth rejects the poet, the greater is the poet's affection for and devotion to him. No matter how vicious the young man is to the poet, the poet does not — emotionally can not — sever the relationship. He masochistically accepts the youth's physical and emotional absence.
Finally, after enduring what he feels is much emotional abuse by the youth, the poet stops begging for his friend's affection. But then, almost unbelievably, the poet begins to think that his newfound silence toward the youth is the reason for the youth's treating him as poorly as he does. The poet blames himself for any wrong the young man has done him and apologizes for his own treatment of his friend. This first major division of sonnets ends with the poet pitiably lamenting his own role in the dissolution of his relationship with the youth.
The second, shorter grouping of Sonnets 127–154 involves the poet's sexual relationship with the Dark Lady, a married woman with whom he becomes infatuated. Similar to his friendship with the young man, this relationship fluctuates between feelings of love, hate, jealousy, and contempt. Also similar is the poet's unhealthy dependency on the woman's affections. When, after the poet and the woman begin their affair, she accepts additional lovers, at first the poet is outraged. However, as he did with the youth, the poet ultimately blames himself for the Dark Lady's abandoning him. The sonnets end with the poet admitting that he is a slave to his passion for the woman and can do nothing to curb his lust. Shakespeare turns the traditional idea of a romantic sonnet on its head in this series, however, as his Dark Lady is not an alluring beauty and does not exhibit the perfection that lovers typically ascribe to their beloved.

6. 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 seest 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
Consumed 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.

7. What can you say about the form and structure of the poem?
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 seest 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
Consumed 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.

8. What does the lexis tell us about the context of the poem?
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 seest 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
Consumed 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.

9. What does the imagery tell us about the subject of the poem?
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 seest 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
Consumed 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.

11. First Quatrain That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Shakespeare tells his beloved that his age is like a ‘time of year’, late autumn, when the leaves have fallen from the trees, the weather has grown cold and the birds have left their branches.
The poet indicates his feeling that he has not long to live through the imagery of the wintry bough, twilight's afterglow, and a fire's dying embers. All the images in this sonnet suggest impending death.
In the first quatrain, the poet compares himself to autumn leaves, but he is unable to pinpoint their exact number, just as he cannot determine how close he is to death: "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold."
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.

12. Second Quatrain
In the second quatrain, he talks of "twilight" as "after the sun fadeth in the west," — a traditional metaphor for death.
He talks of how his age is like late twilight, “As after sunset fadeth in the west,” and the remaining light is slowly extinguished in the darkness, which the speaker likens to “Death’s second self.”
Death is close to the poet in this second quatrain, for he imagines death twice more, first as "black night" and then as sleep, "Death's second self."

13. Third Quatrain
The speaker compares himself to the glowing remnants of a fire, which lies, “on the ashes of his youth”, that is, on the ashes of the logs that once enabled it to burn and which will soon be consumed “by that which it was nourished by” i.e. it will be extinguished as it sinks into the ashes, which its own burning created.
The third quatrain recalls Sonnet 45, in which the poet likened his desire for the young man to "purging fire." Now, however, his fire is but dying embers, a "deathbed" fueled by his love for the youth, "Consumed with that which it was nourished by."

14. Rhyming Couplet
The speaker tells the young man that he must perceive these things, and that his love must be strengthened by the knowledge that he will soon be parted from the speaker when the speaker, like the fire, is extinguished by time.
The conclusion to be drawn from the preceding lines: "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well, which thou must leave ere long." Believing that he will soon die and never see the young man again, the poet's love for the youth intensifies.

15. Literary criticism
The fundamental emotion [in Sonnet 73] is self-pity. Not an attractive emotion. What renders it pathetic, in the good instead of the bad sense, is the sinister diminution of the time concept, quatrain by quatrain. We have first a year, and the final season of it; then only a day, and the stretch of it; then just a fire, built for part of the day, and the final minutes of it; then -- entirely deprived of life, in prospect, and even now a merely objective "that," like a third-person corpse! -- the poet. The imagery begins and continues as visual -- yellow, sunset, glowing -- and one by one these are destroyed; but also in the first quatrain one heard sound, which disappears there; and from the couplet imagery of every kind is excluded, as if the sense were indeed dead, and only abstract, posthumous statement is possible. A year seems short enough; yet ironically the day, and then the fire, makes it in retrospect seem long, and the final immediate triumph of the poem's imagination is that in the last line about the year, line 4, an immense vista is indeed invoked -- that the desolate monasteries strewn over England, sacked in Henry's reign, where 'late' -- not so long ago! a terrible foreglance into the tiny coming times of the poem -- the choirs of monks lifted their little and brief voices, in ignorance of what was coming -- as the poet would be doing now, except that this poem knows. Instinct is here, after all, a kind of thought. This is one of the best poems in English. (John Berryman, The Sonnets)

16. Independent 10
To show that you have engaged with the text, write an overview of the poem.
Make notes on:
• the context of the poem
• the intended audience
• the effects created by the language used

17. Plenary: think pair share
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