The Garden of the Seasons: "That Time of Year" -- Shakespeare's Sonnet and Our Novembers

This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (posted in full below the photos) known to me and to others by its first few words "That time of year," one of those simple phrases that because of the genius of the poem to which it is connected is now iconic.
          Well, now we are at 'that time of year.'
   


 



       

Here's Shakespeare's 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.

      When we discussed this poem in a graduate school course taught by the estimable Helen Vendler, widely regarded as the country's best critical reader of contemporary American poetry (and possibly on everything else written in English as well), she asked us to pin down precisely what time of year the poem was evoking -- pointing out the exactitude with which Shakespeare identifies it:  "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold."
          We are given three depictions of the state of the autumnal "turn" -- yellow leaves, or  none, or few. And this is in fact the stage of late fall that we all observe. Some trees still hold at least a few of their "autumn" tinted leaves -- yellow, orange-yellow, reddish orange, a few true reds. But there are many fewer than were there a couple of weeks ago. We're at the end of the season that many of us find glorious, the 'crowning' of the year, a spectacular natural show in fortunate realms such as New England and, I suspect, parts of Shakespeare's old England. 
          But now the landscape, our world, feels different. We're cold and walk faster; wear heavier clothes. All the oaks' acorns are on the sidewalk. Neighbors have had their -- I almost said 'rakes' -- but of course what I should say is 'leaf blowers' out. While some lawns are 'raked' clean, patches of sidewalk here and there are mounded high with leaves.
           But they never come down all at once. Some trees are bare. Some trees are still turning. And many are holding on to the poem's a "few" leaves. 
            The exactitude of this portrayal is important because this is a poem not about the height of glory, and not about defeat, death, or the symbolic 'death' of winter's frozen landscape -- but about the transitional, or transitory, period of time when we know all that is coming. Here is a persistent truth about life -- human, and natural: it's always in transition. Always transitory.
            Yet this is the time of a year when we can least well avoid noticing it. It's not 'autumn' any more. It's late autumn; winter's eve. We can't help feeling the change and understanding what it means.  

            So then the poem's speaker makes what now feels like an inevitable comparison between 'that time of year' and himself. 
             He's in the twilight of his maturity. The speaker doesn't, with delicacy, go into details of personal appearances. But we can guess them: He's losing his hair. Flesh sagging. He prefers metaphor to physical description:

"In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west...
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie..."

Twilight is of course beautiful, but you know it's not going to last that long. So, the poems appears to be saying, you may still like what you're seeing, but you know it's not going to last. It's like the late glow of an expiring fire. If you've made any fires in a fireplace you know this is what you see. And, as the poem shows through this comparison, our own span of existence is "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by." 
        We die, in the end, from living. We are the fire.    
       And still, as we read in the poem's great coda -- those final two lines -- "which thou" (a stand-in, I believe, meant to apply to all of us human creatures) 
"...perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long."
          Actually, I feel that same way about "that time of year" -- November. I hate the coming cold and the steady loss of daylight, but I love the world's fading beauty and those profound, nostalgic November twilights.             

         I can't remember what more there was to analyze, explicate, or even talk much about in this short masterpiece, except that every word is perfect.
         ...Except, on second thought, one interesting historical note: In line 4, the poem compares the leafless branches of the late autumn trees to "the bare ruin'd choirs." 
          Unlike today's understanding of the word "choir," the choirs the poem is speaking of refer to the spaces within churches -- a place, not the people -- where the church's picked singers (today's 'choir') would sit or stand ready to sing the psalms or chants or other musical passages that we now call "hymns" -- in Latin. Everything done in church was in Latin when England's churches were built with places for the choirs often high above and behind the altar -- to sing the church's beautiful music, until the Protestant Reformation came along, modestly in some respects under the aegis of King Henry VIII's establishment of the Church of England. Henry's plan was for an English Catholic church. The king would rule it; would own the property; would "dissolve" the monasteries at will if he wanted to take possession of their land and other wealth.
           The militant Protestants, who later became the Puritans, took things much further. They banned the Latin, the choirs, and they removed all the music until in the time of Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare's England held hundreds of old churches where the places for the "choir" singers -- had been pulled down, ruined. 
           Happily, however, nothing has ruined those leafless trunks and branches, symbolized as "bare ruin'd choirs" by Shakespeare, in the woodlands and shade trees in our lovely late autumn world -- ...yet.