Love and Pathos in Sonnet 73

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 …

…couplet not only functions as a final request made to the young man to love the speaker while he is still living, but it also highlights the irony that the addressee’s love shall strengthen upon seeing the process in which the fire extinguishes itself. Through the use of extensive succession of metaphors in Sonnet 73, Shakespeare not only successfully produces pathos, but also explicitly manifests the complexity of the role of love in human relationships.