After discussing William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” with my sixth grade class, I wished to record our observations. Those kids are a sharp bunch. Instead of an essay, I ended up writing a prose re-telling of sorts. Please comment your misgivings about this interpretation. If you really want to impress, cite specific text to support your argument.
Sonnet 73
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.
A bare, brittle tree shakes in the November wind. Perhaps a solitary yellow leaf clings to its branch. Like the well-placed marble hand of a Renaissance statue, the leaf preserves a fragile dignity. The branches sang with birds. Now they wail in the wind. One branch reaches after another, but they never touch.
He gathered the dead and fallen: piled their bodies with his chafing hands. The sun is gone. The twilight casts his hands purple, rose, and bone white. Calloused from the wooden shaft, practiced in this warming ritual, they arrange the little ones in crooked, perpendicular lines and guide the moist, hot breath of life to a few orange sparks. The night closes fast. He rubs sleep from his eyes, shivers, and breathes again.
Hewn to my core, my dry heart is riddled and snapping. It glows anew—not humming with sap and living water, but with fire. It breaks me like the old man’s knees; with every pop I release another hold on what I know. I know only fire. I nourish, and I devour. He swallows me, I him.
Rocking back on a log seat, the woodsman tracks the the smoke into the stars. Tomorrow he will try the southern slope.