Sonnet 97
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| Sonnet 97
How like a winter hath my absence been |
Sonnet 97 is the first of three sonnets describing a separation between the speaker and the beloved, commonly viewed as the young man to whom most of the other early sonnets are addressed.
[edit] Paraphrase
My separation from you has seemed like winter, since you give pleasure to the year. Winter has seemed to be everywhere, even though in reality our separation occurred during summer and fall, when the earth produces plant life like a widow giving birth after the death of her husband. Yet I saw these fruits of nature as hopeless orphans, since it could not be summer unless you were here; since you were away, even the birds did not sing, or rather sang so plaintively that they made the very leaves look pale, thinking of winter.
[edit] Sources and analysis
Following Edmond Malone, T. W. Baldwin notes a resemblance between this poem's trope for the seasons and the "childing autumn" of A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.112; he traces the figure to Ovid.
Dowden says that 97 seems to begin a new group of sonnets, comprising 97, 98, and 99. Edward Hubler remarks on the "passages of unobtrusive melody and easy grace."
Thematically, the poem belongs among those poems treating absence or separation. Hilton Landry groups the sonnet with others, such as 54 and 55, in which the speaker is forced to call to mind a an inferior mental substitute for his absent beloved.
[edit] References
- Alden, Raymond. The Sonnets of Shakespeare, with Variorum Reading and Commentary. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1916.
- Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakspeare's Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
- Dowden, Edward. Shakespeare's Sonnets. London, 1881.
- Hubler, Edwin. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.
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