Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, the “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” and the meaning of love itself

Love can sing to us, sweetly, and we can build an edifice upon it for that special choir, an edifice composed of both the joy we have in our lover and the fears of how it will end, for everything is ultimately “ruin’d” in this world, but in Shakespeare’s, even a single intentionally shortened syllable means something. 

“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” is the fourth line of William Shakespeare’s melancholy Sonnet 73, the last of the first quatrain.  The sonnet opens by connecting the speaker to the seasons in “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” but then diverges into something of a eulogy for the end of summer and the coming of winter, “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon these boughs which shake against the cold.”  A straightforward reading immerses one in the changing season itself. We naturally interpret the setting as autumn and take the description as a simple, if exceedingly poetic phrasing that captures the image of trees stripped of their leaves and the land itself stripped of life, for even the birds no longer sing.  Upon closer inspection, however, the straightforward interpretation holds more questions than answers.  If the leaves are yellow, how could there be none?  If it’s cold and windy enough to shake the boughs of the trees, how could it still be autumn and there still be leaves?  Why does the speaker disappear from his own soliloquy for three lines, rendering the phrasing “mayst in me behold” a complete non-sequitur?  Why does the speaker seem to disagree with himself in his own description by being confused about something as simple as the presence of the leaves on the trees, only to declare them “bare” and “ruin’d” in his final assessment, and then liken them to church choir?  Further, “ruin’d” isn’t a term one would usually associate with the natural change of the seasons.  Normally, it used to describe the ravages of time on a human construct, hence the line ends a stanza that begins about the speaker, transitions to a contradictory assessment of the seasons, and then ultimately conjures a metaphor of mortal works torn asunder.  In this reading, the logic that appeared to exist on the surface completely falls away, but in doing so, reveals a more compelling story of emotional turmoil lying just beneath.  The speaker is rationalizing the end, or at least the seeming end, of his relationship.  The “sweet birds” singing that had defined the peak of his love, have long since left, leaving only ruins behind, that are emotionally barren and cold, but as is so often the case, he cannot bring himself to accept that it’s truly over.  There might be a few vestiges of love left – the yellow leaves on the trees, that are shaking against the cold yet not yet fallen, reminding him of better days, not “late,” when his love was likened to a song.

The sense of a lover adrift and possibly drowning is compounded in the second verse, when thoughts of the changing seasons are reduced to the end of the day.  The connection between the passing of time and the speaker continues here as well, changing slightly from “mayst in me behold,” to a new phrasing, “In me thou see’st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west.”  Once again, the speaker summons images of some brighter past, where presumably his love was strong, like the rays of the sun, only to watch it fade.  Between the images of the changing seasons and now the setting sun, there is an inevitability to it, as if love reaching an apex in the heat of day or height of summer, only to fade into winter or night is the natural course of things, a reality that lovers simply have to accept, but the speaker’s thoughts soon take a much darker turn, literally and figuratively.  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.”  The passage of time which had previously implied the potential for renewal – as winter becomes spring and night becomes day – has been replaced by a far more permanent metaphor, death, “the undiscovered country from which no traveler returns” as Shakespeare described it in Hamlet.  If the speaker’s love is compared to “death’s second self,” there can be no return to their more elevated state.  The potential self-rationalization that defined the first quatrain no longer exists in this new, much bleaker vision.  The quatrain closes with the notion that the love they shared is dead, sealed up, but the need to self-rationalize is embedded deep in the human psyche, and it is no surprise that the next quatrain begins with considering how his love has reached such a fallen state.  Like its predecessors, this quatrain also begins with a metaphor.  Rather than the seasons or the day, the speaker is even more primal by comparing himself to a simple fire on the verge of being extinguished:

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.

The analogy might seem simple, but it still manages to unleash a torrent of potential interpretations and images.  For the first time in the sonnet, the speaker’s age is mentioned, introducing another aspect wherein the love they shared was potentially a fancy of youth itself, but as time has passed and the young age into adulthood, can no longer sustain itself.  (A topic Shakespeare covers elsewhere with our without love.) The fire metaphor, the inevitable fact of aging, and the fleeting nature of love are all intimately intertwined, becoming inseparable.  Youth, like fire and love, glows, but the act of burning, aging, and loving, transforms the source of the energy into ashes, leaving only a deathbed behind.  Thus, “death’s second self” becomes death itself, whether we are taking the point of view of a fire, love, or a human life, all, in the speaker’s dark analogy, are “Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.”  At the same time, the densely packed metaphors and rapidly changing images, from glowing fires to the ashes of youth, to all of it dying because they devour themselves, carries a thematic echo to the first quatrain, restating it in darker and more permanent form.

In this sense, the second quatrain, which is more straightforward and direct in its imagery and phrasing, serves as a hinge, bringing the poem back to where it began.  The speaker starts in a confused state, mixing images together with abandon, from opening on himself to veering into either autumn or winter, before finally leaving the impression of love as an abandoned building, but through an effort of will, he rights himself in the next quatrain.  Here, he sees things clearly and directly – the sun is setting on his love, leaving only darkness behind, which compared to death makes it permanent unless we return to the metaphor of a sun that rises again.  For love – or at least this particular love – however, that is not possible, plunging him back into frenzied despair.  Rather than any single image, he relies on shifting combinations, as well as a reflection on his own aging process, all of which lead back to the image of death, not the second self of death, but real death this time.  The blending of these ideas is reflected even in the rhyming pattern.  The first and second quatrain both feature greatly differentiated rhymes.  “Behold” with “cold” and “hang” with “sang” in the first, “day” with “away” and “west” with “rest” in the second, but in the third, the sounds are much closer, “fire” with “expire” and “lie” with “by,” sonically capturing the collapse.  This is further echoed in the skipped syllables as part of the iambic, stressed and unstressed pentameter.  In the first and second quatrain, only one word is shortened each, “ruin’d” in the first and “see’st” in the second, but in the third, we have “see’st,” “Consum’d,” and “nourish’d” adding to the sense of an accelerated decline, from which there can be no escape.

Sonnets, however, do not end with the third quatrain.  They conclude instead with a rhyming couplet.  In this case, the speaker ends on a somewhat more positive note:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Taken literally, the entire sonnet’s meaning is recast.  Rather than actually witnessing and remarking upon the end of love, whichever of the metaphors we may choose to describe it, the speaker is hopelessly insecure, considering the potential possibilities that may end their love at some point in the future.  In this context, the autumn or winter has not come yet, the sun hasn’t set, the fire hasn’t burned out, and perhaps the speaker is still in the flush of youth.  The speaker, however, cannot prevent himself from imagining a world in which all of this and more has happened, up to and including death itself.  It’s an old adage that passionate love can breed insane insecurity, and so the speaker vents his fears about how his love will one day end, even if that end is the death of one of the lovers in the natural course of events.  Mortality has its own confines and whether love is lost by burning itself out, outright betrayal, or one of the lovers dying, it will end at some point.  On a more thematic level, however, it is difficult to take the speaker’s protestations that their love is strong entirely seriously.  The very use of the phrase “love more strong” doesn’t reveal the starting point – is it a casual affair, an intense but brief romance, or a long term thing? – the “thou must leave” at least implies an intentional parting, and the overall impression of the first three quatrains is, shall we say, less than positive.  We can reasonable equate “late the sweet birds sang” with “must leave ere long,” suggesting a more rapid conclusion than the speaker would like, especially when the second quatrain accelerates the idea of changing seasons into the timespan of a single day and the third moves things even faster along with the metaphor of a single, sputtering fire.

Ultimately, we can return to where we began, ““Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” for the key to unlocking the entire sonnet if not love itself.  Young love is an emotion for the sweet richness of summer, unable to withstand the coming of a brutal winter.  This doesn’t mean it cannot sing to us, sweetly, or that we do not build an edifice upon it for that special choir, an edifice composed of both warmth and cold, the joy we have in our lover and the fears of how it will end, for everything is ultimately “ruin’d” in this world.  In Shakespeare’s, even that single intentionally shortened syllable means something.  Ruin, yes, a ruination in accelerated time, almost certainly, but also “rune” or “runed,” especially given how close to “ruin’d choir” sounds to “runed star,” as if the fate of this couple, if not all couples, was already written in the stars like the seasons themselves.  

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.