Sonnet 97: How Like a Winter Hath My Absence Been
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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 widowed 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. |
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How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year; |
How much has this period felt like a winter while I was away from you, who you are the thing that gives me the greatest or indeed only pleasure of a year that passes all too quickly.
The fact that you – the young man – are described as 'the pleasure of the fleeting year' has two principal implications and therefore potential meanings: one, as far as I, the poet am concerned, you, the young man, are to the ever-passing seasons a bit like a summer's day, only, of course, as we know since Sonnet 18, "more lovely and more temperate," and, two, there is an obvious and scarcely disguised sensory-sensual element that once more allows us to read into the line a physical, possibly sexual, dimension to the relationship. |
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What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere. |
The comparison of the time of separation to a winter continues: how cold have I felt, and what dark days have I seen, and wherever I have looked there have, to me, been nothing but barren fields and trees devoid of any lusty green, just as the countryside is in old December.
December is 'old' because it comes at the end of the year; in the metaphor of a lifecycle, it is the last stage before death; the new year, by contrast, is young, and spring is endowed with fresh green leaves and sap and flowers and life. And perhaps this is a good moment to remind ourselves, as we have done on one or two occasions before, just how dark and cold and barren an Elizabethan winter, most particularly in the countryside, really is: we are talking about an era when people live with and in the seasons, and when from the last leaves having fallen off the trees until the new leaves appear, the countryside is barren and empty and cold, and nature – although of course it isn't – feels largely lifeless. |
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And yet this time removed was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase, |
And yet, the time I was away from you was actually summer and/or autumn, in reality full, even overflowing with the fruit and produce that is now ripe for harvesting and therefore looks and feels big and plentiful with the riches that have grown since spring.
The stark contrast to the barren winter is here given with what to us sounds like two seasons. We don't know whether Shakespeare means to suggest that the comparison with summer's time is not quite adequate and that he therefore effectively corrects himself to make a stronger point and to set up the analogy that follows, or whether he wants to make us understand that the period of separation has lasted throughout summer into the autumn. Either is possible, of course, as is the suggestion that summer leads into autumn and that the two here, when contrasted with winter, blur into one. |
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Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords' decease; |
The season is further described now as effectively pregnant, bearing the almost excessive and therefore wanton fruit and offspring of the best time for sowing or reproducing, which generally tends to be the early springtime; and so the time of which I speak, this 'pregnant' autumn now comes across like so many wombs of widows whose husbands and therefore lords have since deceased.
We have come across 'wanton' before, most recently in Sonnet 96, and while we don't know for certain how close or not that sonnet is in composition to this sonnet – there is clearly a caesura of sorts, at the very least in terms of the subject matter and the argument being made – we noted there, and indeed before, the connotation 'wanton' carries of sexually unrestrained conduct, which is something that would of course in a time of very limited contraception result in many pregnancies. Shakespeare here ties this into the next metaphor which is that of orphans, by suggesting that the abundance being carried by this season is effectively fatherless, because the person who has seeded it all is no longer around: |
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Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit, |
But these plentiful riches – the fruit, produce, even children, the 'issue' so described – seemed to me like nothing more than the hope and therefore prospect of orphans and offspring without a father.
'Unfathered fruit' is particularly evocative, because we do not normally care too much about the 'father' of fruit, unless 'fruit' stands for 'children' in which case they are, without their father, by definition 'orphans', and so 'orphans' and 'unfathered fruit' are then one and the same thing. We would today probably speak of half-orphaned children if their mother was still alive but their father had died, but in Elizabethan England and for quite some time afterwards, the notion of progeny was so dominant, and therefore the importance of the father so great, that being unfathered effectively equalled being an orphan. |
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For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute, |
And the reason it felt or indeed feels like this to me is simple enough: summer and all its pleasures attend on you, they are in your service and go with you wherever you are, and so when you are not around then even the birds fall silent.
Summer here is personified and so 'his', as so often, stands for 'it'. |
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Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near. |
Or if the birds do sing, then it is with so little joy – so dull a cheer, this paradoxical expression hardly bears translating – that the leaves on the trees look pale, as if they themselves were expecting and dreading that winter is already near, causing them to wither and die, which is of course why it already feels like winter to me.
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Sonnet 97 ushers in a new phase in the relationship between William Shakespeare and his young lover, which, following the upheaval, anguish, doubt, and direct criticism of the young man contained in the group that immediately precedes it, comes across as a series of almost serene reflections first, once again, on a period of separation in this sonnet and the next one, and then, in Sonnets 100 to 103, on the challenge of finding the right words to speak of someone as roundly perfect as the young man, with the unusual Sonnet 99 acting as something of a bridge between these two themes that are henceforth being developed.
Sonnets 97 and 98, though strongly linked and talking much about the same thing – what it feels like to be away from you, my lover – can both stand on their own and do not therefore form a strict pair, not least also because their focus is centred slightly differently, and to quite different effect, as we shall see.
Some people argue that we cannot be sure whether Shakespeare in this sonnet and the next one is really talking about an actual period of separation from his actual lover, postulating that these two sonnets may be talking about an emotional separation only which feels to the poet as if he was away from his young lover all this time.
Some people would additionally, as we have heard, maintain that this and the next poem could both be addressed to just about anyone, since neither makes any specific pronouncements about who the addressee is, which leads them to propose that these sonnets could therefore have been written to or for a woman as easily as for a man.
It behoves me, for the sake of allowing ourselves to be aware of these different perspectives and to acknowledge every so often that absolutely almost everything about these sonnets is conjecture, except the words, to mention this here, though as you will know by now if you have been following this podcast, I do not hold much store with the latter of these views, and I do not, it so happens, believe the former to be a particularly strong one either, as I shall endeavour to briefly explain.
Sonnet 97 – and this too will be mirrored in Sonnet 98 – talks to someone known and familiar. It does not introduce a new set of characteristics, nor does it open up an entirely new chapter. It describes its recipient as "the pleasure of the fleeting year," which suggests that there is a continuity in the relationship that extends beyond the passing year. If this were a poem written to a new fling or a brief affair, to a new love, or someone who is entirely fresh to the poet, it would not make sense to speak of this as an absence which feels like winter, because no such absence could have established itself as noteworthy.
And so while we cannot say who the addressee of this poem is, we can say with an appreciable level of confidence that it is someone with whom Shakespeare has been in a relationship for some time. The only two persons we know this to be true of with certainty at this stage are William Shakespeare's wife Anne in Stratford-upon-Avon and the young man. Nobody is seriously suggesting that this or the next sonnet is addressed to Anne, so the obvious, reasonable, and highly likely candidate therefore is and remains the young man. There is, I am bound to emphasise, no certainty in this matter, but in the absence of certainty, likelihood is, and remains, our friend.
And should you look ahead and think, well how about the Dark Lady? Could this possibly be a Dark Lady sonnet, well, then we would have to ask the question, why is it grouped with the Fair Youth sonnets? If somebody intelligent and knowledgable enough about these sonnets – be that now Shakespeare or someone else – took pains to separate them out of each other and group them into two different segments in the collection, then why would suddenly now this be a sonnet about the Dark Lady? And so we are still in the same land of an absence of certainty, but a great likelihood that this is addressed to the young man.
Does it make sense for a poet who is known for certain to have been away – physically, geographically – from his longish term lover to speak of an absence and compare it – metaphorically, poetically – to a winter when in fact he wasn't absent at all but simply felt as though he had been? Yes and, more emphatically, I should say, no. Of course, a poet can employ any poetic device to any purpose they want any time they feel like it, and this wouldn't be the first or the last time for this poet to layer meaning upon meaning, and so yes, it is possible, and it could even be said, to some extent, to make sense.
But why? When so obviously – see Sonnets 50 & 51, for example – he does have to spend periods away from his lover, why would he need or want to be so abstract and theoretical. Much more likely, surely, is that he is talking about an actual real life absence from his actual real life lover. And not only do we here have an absence of certainty which makes this likelihood, too, our friend, we have a complete absence of any real reason to assume anything else. So while it may suit the abstract, theoretical mind to think in abstract, theoretical terms, it very much suits the poet and the roundly human being to think in terms of the messiness and the trials and tribulations of an actually lived, roundly human existence.
If – and it is this and remains an if – this is the case, then Sonnet 97 on its own, and to some even stronger degree in conjunction with Sonnet 98, turns out to be really rather revealing and to us therefore quite useful. On its own it speaks of a summer time yielding into autumn that he, Shakespeare, has been away from his young lover. It makes these two pieces of information clear enough: "How like a winter hath my absence been | From thee..." – not, your absence from me. This, unless it is just idle, meaningless verbiage, tells us that it is Shakespeare who is, once again, on the road or away.
There are plenty reasons why this should be the case, the most directly imaginable that offers itself is that he is on tour with his theatre company because the theatres in London are closed. We don't know this for certain, but it would make sense. What would also make sense is for this to be an extended period of absence, lasting several weeks, even months.
If we read this sonnet in conjunction with Sonnet 98, which in all likelihood we may do, then the absence either starts even earlier, in the spring, or lasts even longer, until spring, or also possible of course is that Sonnet 98 talks about yet another absence with a very similar, comparable effect on the poet, and the similarities there are so strong that I'm inclined to consider this a less likely possibility, although we can't rule it out of course.
The first line there, in Sonnet 98 – and this is somewhat looking ahead – goes:
From you have I been absent in the spring
Someone may at this point flag up that, ah, Sonnet 97 addresses a 'thou' and 'thee', but Sonnet 98, a 'you', therefore these have to be different people. Not so. We have dealt with this. Shakespeare uses the two forms of address almost interchangeably and evidently to the same person, as we saw most recently in the Rival Poet Sonnets, where we looked at the issue in our discussion of Sonnet 80, having previously done so with Sonnet 13, so if you want to delve further into this question, do please listen to those two episodes.
This, continuing our assumption in the absence of any good reason not to, that the poem is based on real-life events, would allow us to look for a period in Shakespeare's life when such an extended absence from his lover would have been likely to occur, and invite us to see whether it can fit into our overall framework of what we know or think we can know of Shakespeare and his young man.
We know that owing to the plague, London theatres were closed continuously between June 1592 and the spring of 1594, which lies firmly in the bracket of the majority of these Fair Youth sonnets, though in that case possibly more towards the end of that period. There was also a shorter closure of theatres because of the plague in 1596, lasting from probably around August until the autumn. This too, could therefore still fit with Sonnet 97, if not, perhaps, entirely with Sonnet 98. Another closure, this time over concerns of public order and morality rather than because of the plague, was ordered by the Privy Council in 1597, from about July until late autumn, early winter of that year.
If the sequence of these two particular Sonnets, 97 and 98, is correct, rather than reversed, then we should from it assume that 97 was composed first, and 98 second. And Sonnet 97 does something interesting and different to Sonnet 98 that is worth noting: it resolves itself in the present tense which may – it does not necessarily have to, but certainly may – indicate that it is being written while the separation is still ongoing:
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.
Whereas Sonnet 98, as we shall see when we get to it in our next episode, talks about its events and therefore its absence, entirely in the past. This – as always, and I don't mind repeating myself on this, as it is so important, with the prerequisite caution about the levels of uncertainty that persist – would point us towards the earlier of the given windows during which Shakespeare may have been away from London, if the absence was continuous, starting in the summer possibly of 1593 and ending in spring 1594.
To what extent this is or is not likely and therefore does or does not make sense is something we will look at in a special episode dedicated to the possible timeframe or even timeline of the composition of these sonnets and therefore the stories or the episodes in Shakespeare's life that they refer to: it would simply go too far to try and tie this all up into a coherent, tight bundle on this occasion with the discussion of this sonnet.
We also, incidentally, and as briefly hinted at earlier, do not know, of course, whether Sonnets 97 and 98 are being composed directly after the previous group, and so we don't know whether the crisis of the previous group occurred and was then followed by a period of imposed separation, or whether in fact the period of imposed separation led to the young man's infidelity and thus precipitated the crisis of Sonnets 87 through 96.
Edmondson Wells, in case you are interested, following Macdonald P Jackson, keep the group 87-103 intact as it is with the internal sequence unaltered, and time this to approximately 1594-95, which would therefore mean that 97 and 98 follow the previous group, and also sit approximately sit within the potential windows we have available for William Shakespeare possibly being away from London for an extended period,
And so accepting this order for the time being as it is, what is striking and no doubt significant in its own right though is that Sonnet 97 and then Sonnet 98, and also Sonnet 99 and Sonnets 100 to 103 show no reverberation, no echo, no sign of the earlier crisis. If we are in calmer waters here in terms of the relationship, we are also in a blander flavour as far as the poetry is concerned. In this regard, certainly, those who ascribe to Sonnet 97 and then to Sonnet 98 a level of generic applicability, are right: if it is true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, then neither 97 nor 98 really express this much. Sonnet 97 expresses: it feels like winter when you are away, and Sonnet 98 will leave the door open for an interpretation that may, just may, suggest that Shakespeare himself was not absolutely, entirely, one hundred percent faithful to his young man during this time of separation either.
I say 'it may': it may also not suggest that, but finding out whether it does or whether it doesn't and why we should even think that it might, that really is now for the next episode on Sonnet 98...
Sonnets 97 and 98, though strongly linked and talking much about the same thing – what it feels like to be away from you, my lover – can both stand on their own and do not therefore form a strict pair, not least also because their focus is centred slightly differently, and to quite different effect, as we shall see.
Some people argue that we cannot be sure whether Shakespeare in this sonnet and the next one is really talking about an actual period of separation from his actual lover, postulating that these two sonnets may be talking about an emotional separation only which feels to the poet as if he was away from his young lover all this time.
Some people would additionally, as we have heard, maintain that this and the next poem could both be addressed to just about anyone, since neither makes any specific pronouncements about who the addressee is, which leads them to propose that these sonnets could therefore have been written to or for a woman as easily as for a man.
It behoves me, for the sake of allowing ourselves to be aware of these different perspectives and to acknowledge every so often that absolutely almost everything about these sonnets is conjecture, except the words, to mention this here, though as you will know by now if you have been following this podcast, I do not hold much store with the latter of these views, and I do not, it so happens, believe the former to be a particularly strong one either, as I shall endeavour to briefly explain.
Sonnet 97 – and this too will be mirrored in Sonnet 98 – talks to someone known and familiar. It does not introduce a new set of characteristics, nor does it open up an entirely new chapter. It describes its recipient as "the pleasure of the fleeting year," which suggests that there is a continuity in the relationship that extends beyond the passing year. If this were a poem written to a new fling or a brief affair, to a new love, or someone who is entirely fresh to the poet, it would not make sense to speak of this as an absence which feels like winter, because no such absence could have established itself as noteworthy.
And so while we cannot say who the addressee of this poem is, we can say with an appreciable level of confidence that it is someone with whom Shakespeare has been in a relationship for some time. The only two persons we know this to be true of with certainty at this stage are William Shakespeare's wife Anne in Stratford-upon-Avon and the young man. Nobody is seriously suggesting that this or the next sonnet is addressed to Anne, so the obvious, reasonable, and highly likely candidate therefore is and remains the young man. There is, I am bound to emphasise, no certainty in this matter, but in the absence of certainty, likelihood is, and remains, our friend.
And should you look ahead and think, well how about the Dark Lady? Could this possibly be a Dark Lady sonnet, well, then we would have to ask the question, why is it grouped with the Fair Youth sonnets? If somebody intelligent and knowledgable enough about these sonnets – be that now Shakespeare or someone else – took pains to separate them out of each other and group them into two different segments in the collection, then why would suddenly now this be a sonnet about the Dark Lady? And so we are still in the same land of an absence of certainty, but a great likelihood that this is addressed to the young man.
Does it make sense for a poet who is known for certain to have been away – physically, geographically – from his longish term lover to speak of an absence and compare it – metaphorically, poetically – to a winter when in fact he wasn't absent at all but simply felt as though he had been? Yes and, more emphatically, I should say, no. Of course, a poet can employ any poetic device to any purpose they want any time they feel like it, and this wouldn't be the first or the last time for this poet to layer meaning upon meaning, and so yes, it is possible, and it could even be said, to some extent, to make sense.
But why? When so obviously – see Sonnets 50 & 51, for example – he does have to spend periods away from his lover, why would he need or want to be so abstract and theoretical. Much more likely, surely, is that he is talking about an actual real life absence from his actual real life lover. And not only do we here have an absence of certainty which makes this likelihood, too, our friend, we have a complete absence of any real reason to assume anything else. So while it may suit the abstract, theoretical mind to think in abstract, theoretical terms, it very much suits the poet and the roundly human being to think in terms of the messiness and the trials and tribulations of an actually lived, roundly human existence.
If – and it is this and remains an if – this is the case, then Sonnet 97 on its own, and to some even stronger degree in conjunction with Sonnet 98, turns out to be really rather revealing and to us therefore quite useful. On its own it speaks of a summer time yielding into autumn that he, Shakespeare, has been away from his young lover. It makes these two pieces of information clear enough: "How like a winter hath my absence been | From thee..." – not, your absence from me. This, unless it is just idle, meaningless verbiage, tells us that it is Shakespeare who is, once again, on the road or away.
There are plenty reasons why this should be the case, the most directly imaginable that offers itself is that he is on tour with his theatre company because the theatres in London are closed. We don't know this for certain, but it would make sense. What would also make sense is for this to be an extended period of absence, lasting several weeks, even months.
If we read this sonnet in conjunction with Sonnet 98, which in all likelihood we may do, then the absence either starts even earlier, in the spring, or lasts even longer, until spring, or also possible of course is that Sonnet 98 talks about yet another absence with a very similar, comparable effect on the poet, and the similarities there are so strong that I'm inclined to consider this a less likely possibility, although we can't rule it out of course.
The first line there, in Sonnet 98 – and this is somewhat looking ahead – goes:
From you have I been absent in the spring
Someone may at this point flag up that, ah, Sonnet 97 addresses a 'thou' and 'thee', but Sonnet 98, a 'you', therefore these have to be different people. Not so. We have dealt with this. Shakespeare uses the two forms of address almost interchangeably and evidently to the same person, as we saw most recently in the Rival Poet Sonnets, where we looked at the issue in our discussion of Sonnet 80, having previously done so with Sonnet 13, so if you want to delve further into this question, do please listen to those two episodes.
This, continuing our assumption in the absence of any good reason not to, that the poem is based on real-life events, would allow us to look for a period in Shakespeare's life when such an extended absence from his lover would have been likely to occur, and invite us to see whether it can fit into our overall framework of what we know or think we can know of Shakespeare and his young man.
We know that owing to the plague, London theatres were closed continuously between June 1592 and the spring of 1594, which lies firmly in the bracket of the majority of these Fair Youth sonnets, though in that case possibly more towards the end of that period. There was also a shorter closure of theatres because of the plague in 1596, lasting from probably around August until the autumn. This too, could therefore still fit with Sonnet 97, if not, perhaps, entirely with Sonnet 98. Another closure, this time over concerns of public order and morality rather than because of the plague, was ordered by the Privy Council in 1597, from about July until late autumn, early winter of that year.
If the sequence of these two particular Sonnets, 97 and 98, is correct, rather than reversed, then we should from it assume that 97 was composed first, and 98 second. And Sonnet 97 does something interesting and different to Sonnet 98 that is worth noting: it resolves itself in the present tense which may – it does not necessarily have to, but certainly may – indicate that it is being written while the separation is still ongoing:
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.
Whereas Sonnet 98, as we shall see when we get to it in our next episode, talks about its events and therefore its absence, entirely in the past. This – as always, and I don't mind repeating myself on this, as it is so important, with the prerequisite caution about the levels of uncertainty that persist – would point us towards the earlier of the given windows during which Shakespeare may have been away from London, if the absence was continuous, starting in the summer possibly of 1593 and ending in spring 1594.
To what extent this is or is not likely and therefore does or does not make sense is something we will look at in a special episode dedicated to the possible timeframe or even timeline of the composition of these sonnets and therefore the stories or the episodes in Shakespeare's life that they refer to: it would simply go too far to try and tie this all up into a coherent, tight bundle on this occasion with the discussion of this sonnet.
We also, incidentally, and as briefly hinted at earlier, do not know, of course, whether Sonnets 97 and 98 are being composed directly after the previous group, and so we don't know whether the crisis of the previous group occurred and was then followed by a period of imposed separation, or whether in fact the period of imposed separation led to the young man's infidelity and thus precipitated the crisis of Sonnets 87 through 96.
Edmondson Wells, in case you are interested, following Macdonald P Jackson, keep the group 87-103 intact as it is with the internal sequence unaltered, and time this to approximately 1594-95, which would therefore mean that 97 and 98 follow the previous group, and also sit approximately sit within the potential windows we have available for William Shakespeare possibly being away from London for an extended period,
And so accepting this order for the time being as it is, what is striking and no doubt significant in its own right though is that Sonnet 97 and then Sonnet 98, and also Sonnet 99 and Sonnets 100 to 103 show no reverberation, no echo, no sign of the earlier crisis. If we are in calmer waters here in terms of the relationship, we are also in a blander flavour as far as the poetry is concerned. In this regard, certainly, those who ascribe to Sonnet 97 and then to Sonnet 98 a level of generic applicability, are right: if it is true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, then neither 97 nor 98 really express this much. Sonnet 97 expresses: it feels like winter when you are away, and Sonnet 98 will leave the door open for an interpretation that may, just may, suggest that Shakespeare himself was not absolutely, entirely, one hundred percent faithful to his young man during this time of separation either.
I say 'it may': it may also not suggest that, but finding out whether it does or whether it doesn't and why we should even think that it might, that really is now for the next episode on Sonnet 98...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!