How like a winter hath my absence beenFrom 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 widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:Yet this abundant issue seem’d to meBut hope of orphans, and unfather’d 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.
William Shakespeare · Shakespeare's Sonnets
Love & longing
“How like a winter hath my absence been”
- Author
- William Shakespeare
- Work
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- Year
- 1609
- Chapter / part
- Sonnet XCVII
- Length
- 107 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #1041
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. William Shakespeare died in 1616, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1609. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
Related passages
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyesI all alone beweep my outcast state,And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,And look upon myself, and curse my fate,Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,With what I most enjoy contented least;Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,Haply I think on thee, and then my state,Like to the lark at break of day arisingFrom sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth bringsThat then I scorn to change my state with kings.
That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.In me thou see’st the twilight of such dayAs after sunset fadeth in the west;Which by and by black night doth take away,Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.
All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
My bride,My wife, my life. O we will walk this world,Yoked in all exercise of noble end,And so through those dark gates across the wildThat no man knows. Indeed I love thee: come,Yield thyself up: my hopes and thine are one:Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself;Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me.
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