Sonnet · Fair Youth Sonnets

Sonnet 97

How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!

What old December’s bareness everywhere!

And yet this time removed was summer’s time;

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,

Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:

Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me

But hope of orphans, and unfather’d fruit;

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,

And, thou away, the very birds are mute:

Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,

That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

What it's about

A lover describes how his beloved's absence transforms the natural world, no matter what season it actually is. Physically he's experiencing autumn's abundance, but emotionally it all registers as barren winter. The sonnet uses nature's fertility — rendered hollow without the beloved — to measure the depth of separation.

In plain English

Being apart from you has felt like enduring a long winter. The days were dark and cold, stripped bare like December — even though the actual season was supposed to be autumn, rich with harvest and abundance.

But all that ripeness meant nothing to me without you. The fruit, the growth, the plenty — it all looked like orphaned things, born but fatherless. Because you *are* summer itself; when you're gone, even the birds stop singing.

If they do sing, it's halfhearted and sad. The leaves themselves seem to lose their color, as if dreading that winter is coming. Your absence drains the world of its life.

Lines that stick

How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee
And, thou away, the very birds are mute

Themes

absence
love
time
nature
devotion

Sonnet 97

What it's about

In plain English

Lines that stick

Themes

Tap any word to see it explained.