Question

Reread the final lines of both Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73" and Housman's "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now." What similar point do both poets make about how to use the short time we spend on Earth?

Answer 1

Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73" and Housman's "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" both touches on the issues of life and death from the perspectives of an old man and a twenty-year-old boy.

Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” is the sonnet from an old man’s perspective. He finds himself to be ashes which are the result of fire and can never turn back to its original state. He takes the help of metaphors to compare the cycle of life and death with the cycle of seasons and rotation of day and night. The speaker here wants to go back to his youth days and live the life again but he’s very well acquainted with the fact that it is not possible.

Housman's "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" too looks upon the theme of life and death from a boy’s perspective who has turned twenty.

The boy gets terrified when he analyses that he has only fifty years more to live in this world. He wants to go back into the woods and live the life to its fullest. The boy complains about the short span of life he has left and the only thing which is promised in a life is death. However, he wants to achieve everything in this life of his before death touches him.