English Poetry I: From Chaucer to Gray.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. |
| |
| 126. Ninety-seventh Sonnet |
| | | William Shakespeare (1564–1616) |
| |
| |
| 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; | 5 |
| 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; | 10 |
| 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. | |
| |
|
|
|
