12/31/2019 A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97: ‘How like a winter hath my absence been’ - Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97: ‘How like a winter hath my

absence been’
A commentary on Shakespeare’s 97 th sonnet
Sonnet 97 has a famous opening line, but the rest of the poem remains less famous. Yet the poets Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and Don Paterson have both expressed admiration for it, so the sonnet is worth closer analysis
and explication. Before we proceed to a few words of commentary on Sonnet 97, here’s a reminder of the poem.
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 seemed to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered 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.
To paraphrase Sonnet 97: ‘When I was absent from you, although it was literally summer, it felt like winter,
because I was apart from you. I have felt cold, the days have appeared dark, and it feels like December
everywhere I look, with everything bare and empty. Yet when I was removed from you it was summer – or late
summer, early autumn – with the fruitfulness of nature one associates with that time of year. It’s a bit like a lord’s
widow, who fell pregnant with her husband’s child but who was made a widow before the child was born. Yet all
this abundance seemed to me to be like an fatherless child; because you are free to enjoy summer with all its
pleasures, while I – because away from you – have to dwell in winter, when no birds sing. Or, if they do sing, it’s
such a sad song that it makes all the leaves on the trees pale, because they dread the approach of winter.’
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12/31/2019 A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97: ‘How like a winter hath my absence been’ - Interesting Literature

Such a more detailed summary or paraphrase might be further reduced to: ‘It may be summer, but since I’m
away from you, my beloved, it feels like winter to me.’ This, in a sentence, is the meaning of Sonnet 97. Simple
and straightforward, although some of the imagery (especially the talk of pregnancy and abundance) needs
careful attention. Indeed, this middle section of the sonnet reads like a precursor to a poem by that great follower
and admirer of Shakespeare, John Keats, whose ‘To Autumn’ celebrates the bountiful time of the year that is
autumn (rather than being sad because of an absent love). Another poem we might fruitfully compare
Shakespeare’s with is an even earlier sonnet in English, the Earl of Surrey’s ‘The Soote Season’, in which the
poet laments the fact that he feels sad during the summer, when the whole world is frolicking and growing and
being reborn. This discordance between the outer world of nature and the inner world of melancholy the poet is
feeling is a poignant one in both poems.

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