The narrator opens the poem by comparing the passing of his life to the season autumn, which quickly fades into the cold, barren winter. He also compares his dwindling time to common motifs such as twilight, and the embers of a once-roaring fire. Typical of Shakespeare sonnets, however, there is a twist in the final couplet: the narrator directly addresses someone in this final couplet, saying that that person sees all of these images of dying, but they make that person’s love stronger (perhaps for the narrator), since that person knows they will eventually lose the object of their affections. This final couplet could also be viewed as the narrator advising the readers that we see age and the ones we love getting older, so we should increase our love for them even more, because we don’t know how much time we have left with them.
