In "Sonnet 73," the speaker uses a series of metaphors to characterize what he perceives to be the nature of his old age. This poem is not simply a procession of interchangeable metaphors; it is the story of a slow speaker struggling with the definitiveness of his age and its impermanence in time. In the first quatrain, the speaker contrasts his age as a "time of year": late autumn, when the "yellow leaves" have fallen almost completely from the trees and the branches "tremble with the cold." These metaphors they clearly indicate that winter, which usually symbolizes loneliness and desolation, is coming. Here the reader will easily notice the similarity between the season and the age of the speaker. As winter is usually considered the end of a season , this also implies that the sp...