[Line 1]* - 'that time of year' is late autumn or early winter.[Line 2]* - Compare the line with Macbeth (5.3. 23) "my way of life/has fallen into the clear, the yellow leaf".[Line 4]* - 'Naked and ruined choirs' is a reference to the remains of a church or, more specifically, a presbytery, stripped of its roof and exposed to the elements. Once the choirs resounded with the sounds of the "sweet birds". Some argue that lines 3 and 4 should be read without pause: the "yellow leaves" tremble against the "cold/naked and ruined choruses." If we assume that the adjective 'cold' modifies 'naked and ruined choirs', then the image becomes more concrete: those branches crash against the ruins of the church. Some editors, however, choose to insert "like" into the opening of line 4, thus changing the passage to mean "the branches of yellow leaves tremble against the cold as the jagged arches of the choir stand exposed to the cold." The noted 18th-century scholar George Steevens commented that this image "was probably suggested to Shakespeare by our desolate monasteries. The resemblance between the vault of a Gothic [sic] island and an avenue of trees whose upper branches meet and form a arch above the head, is too startling not to be recognized. The roof of the one is shattered and the branches of the other leafless, the comparison becomes more solemn and picturesque" (Smith 148). 7]* - 'black night' is a metaphor for death itself. As the 'black night' closes around the remaining light of day, so too does death close around the poet.[Line 8]* - 'The second self of death' i.e. 'black night' or 'sleep'. Macbeth refers to sleep as 'The death of every day's life' (2.2.49).[Line 12]* - 'that' i.e. the poet's desires.[Line 13]* -...... half of sheet .. ....the west, after the sun sets in the west, which little by little the black night takes away, which soon fades away in the black night, the second self of death, which seals everything in rest. The image of death that envelops Everything in rest. In me you see the splendor of such a fire. In me you can see the burning embers that lie on the ashes of its youth, that lie on the ashes left from the flame of my youth, like the deathbed on which it must expire as on a deathbed where (youth) must finally die , consumed by what it was nourished by. Consumed by what once nourished him. You perceive this, which makes your love stronger, you feel this, and it makes your love more determined to love that good that you will have to leave behind soon. Making you love what you will have to give up soon.