Sonnet 97


Sonnet 97 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It is the first of three sonnets describing a separation between the speaker and the beloved.

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.

Structure

Sonnet 97 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 6th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

 × / × / × / × / × / 
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
 / × × / × / × / × / 
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,

It is followed by an initial reversal, a fairly common metrical variation which also potentially occurs in lines 1, 9, and 13. A mid-line inversion occurs in line 8 and, more plainly, line 14:

 × / × / / × × / × / 
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.