Love and Pathos in Sonnet 73
            
            
            
             In love poems, it is common that poets either celebrate the intensity of his/her love for another or grieve the absence of reciprocated love. "Love," evidently, can be both a nourishing power that brings happiness and exuberance, and a destructive force that causes sorrow and hopelessness. This dual function of love is dominant in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, in which the speaker, a dying old man, addresses his lover in attempt to evoke pity and sorrow. The speaker's attempt to produce pathos can be seen in the succession of temporal metaphors, juxtaposition of life and death, and repetition of phrases.
             The speaker uses a number of metaphors associated with time to induce a sense of pity and love from his lover. He draws comparisons of himself, a man in his final years, to mainly three objects that represent the approach of death: autumn, the twilight of an autumn day, and a self-destructive fire. The implication of the first metaphor, autumn, is self-evident; it depicts the time of the year of decaying and withering of living things in the natural world and the advent of the cold, lifeless winter, which parallels his own conditions. Specifically, the imagery of a few "yellow leaves...[that] hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold" (lines 2-3) vividly portrays the declining man who is "hanging" on to his life like the leaves are to the tree branch. The branch, moreover, is compared to "bare ruined choirs" (line 4), and further creates a sense of desolation and solitude that the speaker is perhaps experiencing as he approaches the end of his life. The speaker actually never even mentions the word "autumn," but instead refers it to "That time of year" (lines 1-3), as if the word "autumn" is a synonym of death and the direct speaking of it should be euphemized. The second metaphor, twilight, builds upon the first...