“You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.”~Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

This sonnet surprised me by appearing on three people’s lists. I don’t remember ever reading it before.

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 perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The website, No Sweat Shakespeare, has prose translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets:

You may see that time of year in me when few, or no, yellow leaves hang on those branches that shiver in the cold bare ruins of the choir stalls where sweet birds sang so recently. You see, in me, the twilight of a day, after the sun has set in the west, extinguished by the black night that imitates Death, which closes everything in rest. You see in me the glowing embers that are all that is left of the fire of my youth – the deathbed on which youth must inevitably die, consumed by the life that once fed it. This is something you can see, and it gives your love the strength deeply to love that which you have to lose soon.

So the poet is old, and the addressee is young. But whoever it is the poet is talking to can see what the poet is and used to be, and so age makes the young person love the poet more? Even though the inevitable parting is coming soon. (Ha! I agree with Mr. Berry, but that doesn’t stop me from trying anyway.)

The urchins asked if I was going to add a video to every one of these poetry posts, and I said no, but I couldn’t resist this one. “Dallas Bill” quotes Sonnet 73, and then he goes on to explain sonnets in general and the meaning of this sonnet in particular. Priceless.