In "Sonnet 97" the speaker is lamenting being separated from his beloved. To be apart from her for so long feels like the cold of winter. And yet they first parted during the summer, a time of great beauty and the full flowering of nature's bounty:
Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit.
"Abundant" means something that exists in large quantities, so the speaker's referring here to the fruits of nature. "Issue" in this particular context means something produced. Here, nature has produced her summer fruits in abundance. But the speaker's not remotely interested in any of that. He's still longing for his beloved; indeed, he's pining for her so much so that, to him, the bounties of nature no longer mean anything:
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute.
The pleasures of summer are nothing without the presence of the speaker's love by his side. One season changes imperceptibly into another, yet they might as well all be winter, so terribly sad and bereft is the speaker without his love.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45101/sonnet-97-how-like-a-winter-hath-my-absence-been
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Which image in the poem "Sonnet 97" conveys nature's bounty?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe, is a novel. A novel is a genre defined as a long imaginative work of literature written in prose. ...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
The title of the book refers to its main character, Mersault. Only a very naive reader could consider that the stranger or the foreigner (an...
No comments:
Post a Comment