Walter Cohen on Sonnet 7

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Walter Cohen on Sonnet 73

In the introduction to our book, The Norton Shakespeare (3E), the scholar Walter Cohen explains in some detail how this famous sonnet works. He analyzes how each quatrain "pursues a different metaphor" to make an argument: autumn, twilight, a dying fire, each equivalent to aging, ending, and death, respectively. He also notes that these cycles in the poem have no transition or completion. There's no winter or spring to follow the fall, night and morning to follow dusk, or a new fire from the old one. But they are all connected somehow to emphasize the mood of the person speaking in the poem and the sadness he is trying to convey. 

Cohen emphasizes the many facets of Shakespeare's words: "leaves" are from a tree and the pages of a book, "choirs" to groups of birds or gatherings of pages, and the importance of the "glowing" of the fire. It's dying, but still alive. Oddly, "Life and death have the same source."

Norton Shakespeare (1790-91)