Over at the Forest of Arden, I had a lot of trouble figuring out Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97, then suddenly put together an explication of it I liked so much, I’m posting it here.
Sonnet 97
How like a Winter hath my absence beene
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting yeare?
What freezings haue I felt, what darke daies seene?
What old Decembers barenesse euery where?
And yet this time remou’d was sommers time,
The teeming Autumne big with ritch increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widdowed wombes after their Lords decease:
Yet this aboundant issue seem’d to me,
But hope of Orphans, and vn-fathered fruite,
For Sommer and his pleasures waite on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute.
Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheere,
That leaues looke pale, dreading the Winters neere.
* * * * *
Okay, here beginnith my explication:
How like a Winter hath my absence beene
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting yeare?
What freezings haue I felt, what darke daies seene?
What old Decembers barenesse euery where?
the quickly passing year, is like being in winter.
Coldness, darkness, December’s bareness seem
everywhere to me, as everyone agrees. Vendler
adds that Shakespeare is picturing an “imaginary
winter.” He isn’t. He’s just making a simile.
And yet this time remou’d was sommers time,
The time we’ve been apart was summer.
Still straightforward and undebatable.
The teeming Autumne big with ritch increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widdowed wombes after their Lords decease:
NoSweatShakespeare, a website with sonnet analyses, put
an “and” at the beginning of this. I wouldn’t, but the
“and,” which I’d previously thought of, too, then discarded
helped me accept this as just a continuation of the previous line:
I missed, Joe, Sally . . . The speaker was gone during the
end of summer and much of autumn. . . So, to backtrack:
And yet this time remou’d was sommers time,
The teeming Autumne big with ritch increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widdowed wombes after their Lords decease:
The time I have been away from you was
summer followed by autumn, which was
bearing a good crop like women bearing dead
husbands’ offspring.
Yet this aboundant issue seem’d to me,
But hope of Orphans, and vn-fathered fruite,
However fine the autumn, abundant and promising
seemed to me a dreary place for orphans and fruit
no love-making had produced, which is about
as nearly everyone would have it, I’m sure.
For Sommer and his pleasures waite on thee,
For, imaginatively, it’s still summer, because the realest
summer although it wasn’t exactly hers) is still waiting for
the addressee’s to continue.
Confession: I got the contrast of what’s imagined, what real,
from Vendler.
And thou away, the very birds are mute.
Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheere,
That leaues looke pale, dreading the Winters neere.
Back in the real world, where it’s autumn, the birdies
and the leafies are sad, thinking about the nearness
of winter.
Have I more or less finally gotten it? Regardless, I feel
quite buoyed to have come up with what I did. Later I
discovered Robert Stonehouse had much the same
interpretation as mine, but I think I did better on
“summer/ Autumn” and “summer waits” than he,
so remain happy about my achievement.