Queer Temporality and the Poetics of Ageing: Re reading Shakespeares Sonnet 73 (LXXIII)

Abstract

This study undertakes a queer-theoretical re-examination of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, arguing that the poem’s meditation on ageing acquires new meaning when situated within the framework of queer temporality. While traditional scholarship has emphasized the poem’s metaphors of seasonal decline, twilight, and the extinguishing flame as emblematic of the speaker’s approaching death, relatively little attention has been given to how these images operate within a relational dynamic structured by non-normative desire. The sonnet’s asymmetrical age relationship between the older speaker and the younger beloved disrupts heteronormative life scripts tied to reproductive futurity, lineage, and linear time, revealing a form of intimacy that unfolds through vulnerability, affective interdependence, and temporal dissonance. Employing an integrative methodological design that combines close reading, discourse analysis, queer theory, affect studies, and early modern cultural contexts, this study argues that Sonnet 73 stages ageing as an affective and relational experience rather than a solitary existential crisis. The results demonstrate that the poem can be read as a queer negotiation of time, mortality, and desire that challenges normative models of ageing in Renaissance literature. The paper concludes by identifying significant opportunities for future scholarship at the intersections of queer temporality, early modern embodiment, and the poetics of late-life desire.