"Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been" by William Shakespeare

Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been

by William Shakespeare

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 remov'd was summer's time,

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burthen 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;

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.


In general, I agree with Edgar Allen Poe about the size of poems: " I hold that long poems don't exist." In his essay, "The Poetic Principle", Poe felt readers get excited when reading a great poem but lose interest if the poem was of "any great length." Of course the above sonnet by Shakespeare is required to be 14 lines in order to be a sonnet, but I prefer the shorter poem as a whole.

There are many ways of looking at a particular poem or work of a poet that is valid and in the history of literary criticism one approach will be more popular than others. Sometimes, I like to look at it from the approach of what was happening in the life of the poet and sometimes not. I did that last night in some poetry by D.H. Lawrence. It convinced me that the true model of the lover of Lady Chatterley in the book, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was not Mrs. Lawrence's second husband as he claimed to be. Lawrence was a better writer than that and the Italian a worse man than that.

In college, it seemed to me that looking at a work of literature and poetry was often done through the life of the poet and writer as my memory serves me. It could have been the time I went to school or when the teachers were trained. I don't know. As I said, sometimes this way of looking at a poem or novel or whatever has its advantages and sometimes it does not. I can see in my own life that looking at a novel or even a short story would not be particularly useful. In Shakespeare's life, I would think there would be no advantage at all since so little of his life is known and even the authorship of his plays and sonnets are up to question. (In my mind, this is no longer a question. I am sure Shakespeare is the author and poet of his work.) I have read books and seen programs in which studing the times when the work was written was illuminating.

However, in the case of this particular entry, I chose this particular sonnet because it involves the season, winter. Since coming to an area that has seasons, I have been enjoying them especially after being in a part of the country when I felt particularly that I was more of a prisoner of them more than anything else. The seasons were more pronounced and where I am living now there are definite seasons but none of the confining aspects of them as my home is in Northern California.

The sonnet was written by a man as he is thinking about a woman he has left somewhere, someplace else while he probably is earning a living. He had left her in summer. It is possible that he did not leave her at all and that she had died too or their love had died. That is one of the things about Shakespeare that I really love and that there are many layers of meaning in his plays and poetry and many ways of interpreting what things mean. I appreciated that when I was writing essays in my Shakespeare English class although I did not care for the professor as he saw many of his students for possible rivals in interpreting and advancing in literary criticism. He saw his students as upstarts that needed to be keep down.( Sadly, he died less than six months after I took his class. He knew he was dying but could not stand to stay home and slowly take his leave. He was competitively until the very end. )

I grew up in a place where I could not tell the seasons at all except summers were the months that the schools were closed and I could read as much as I want. I also could not wear shoes as my mother felt it was a waste to wear shoes if we weren't in school or in church.( I had learned a terrible regard for shoes that I never lost. I wear them all of the time. I am wearing them now although I am in the living room in a chair and the room is completely carpeted. My mother has very bad feet because she insists on wearing cheap shoes although she can afford good shoes now.)

When I first lived somewhere during the winter, I was astonished how different everything looked. Deciduous trees are bare in December but they are swelling up like pregnant women about now with buds of leaves and blossoms. When I went driving around yesterday, I noticed so many trees in full blossom. Winter ends about March 21st so having so many trees in full bloom in February used to bother me.

In England, it stays lighter in the Spring longer than it does here. I remember it being light in May at 10 pm and someone told me that it was light that long because it was higher in the Northern Hemisphere than we are here in Northern California. (They also don't have trouble with flies and don't have screens which I thought was nifty.)

Of course, it is possible the poet isn't in winter at all but only feels he is because of the loss of his love's company. We have all felt that way from time to time. We miss someone and feel as if everything as turned gray. That was the first thing I noticed about winter in a place that was not in the city. The countryside turns gray, the grass, trees, skies all the color of slate gray as if one took a pencil and colored everything in with pencil gray. Even the pine trees that keep its pine needles looked gray to me. Its winter here but nothing looks gray. I am looking out the window to the west and see the different hues of green. Ah, California.

The poet calls autumn teeming with excess. Usually, I don't think of fall that way. It is a time when things seem to be dying and slowing down although the colors are brilliant and spectacular. Birds such as swans, duck, goose are all getting ready to leave except for a few breeds. Canada Geese don't leave which makes one wonder why they are called "Canada". In that regard, there is a lot of movement to get things done such as raking leaves, sawing wood for the winter, covering things up before the snow and so on. But "teeming with excess" ? I don't understand that one.

My favorite approach of looking at poetry is to relate it to things in my life which is what I have done here. Is the poem something that speaks to the reader? What does it say? What memories does it bring up? I like those questions. Each reader brings to each poem something unique and of course valid. I would hate to be the type of teacher, instructor, professor that demands one sort of answer and no other. A question of color symbolism is important in a poem but the answer may vary. If a person lived in Florida, then a question about snow would have different meanings than to a person who was raised in Maine. It would be right if one based it one some sort of reasoning that was valid and could be backed in some way. In this country, white is often symbolizes purity which is important in marriage; however in other countries women are not married in white but people are buried in that color instead as it symbolizes sterility, death. It all depends. It is all relative. It is all fun.

"People" by D.H. Lawrence

People

by D. H. Lawrence

The great gold apples of night

Hang from the street's long bough

Dripping their light

On the faces that drift below,

On the faces that drift and blow

Down the night-time, out of sight

In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night

Distilling over me

Makes sickening the white

Ghost-flux of faces that hie

Them endlessly, endlessly by

Without meaning or reason why

They ever should be.

Source: Poetry (July 1918).

A while ago, I wrote a poem or a prose piece about walking in the evening when I was a young teenager in the empty streets of a small California city. It was a new city, paved and each street had sidewalks with new trees planted along side new California style ranch houses. There wasn't enough neon lights then so the sky was clear with stars and a moon.

The housing project was built in the late 1950's to take care of the new population of people moving from government housing that was being closed down in other parts of the larger city to the north. Many of the people worked in aircraft factories such as Rohr, Solar, Convair that was located not to far away and we were all white families with stay at home mothers and all of us were from other states who had relocated there because

of the U.S. Navy. When the men were discharged, they decided to stay. My father was from Arkansas but was in the U.S. Army, but worked at Solar.

I was barely 13 years old and living in a very dysfunctional family. Still, the place was safe then. In the evening it was better to be walking the streets than in a house where my very sad and drunk father was swinging at the world and my mother was cowling in a corner. The housing project w

as built up from the south end of the bay and the Pacific Ocean could also be scene as well as a few island out at sea.

It was astonishingly beautiful view. I would watch the sun descend westward over the ocean and the stars appear. I never saw anyone else walking those wide and clear streets. I had to be careful of the teens driving their hot rods but they were not watching the scenery. I would see falling stars and a moon that looked as if the young trees would almost touch them.

I smelled spaghetti sauce, meatloaf, and hear the incessant television sets which were in black and white then. I heard the laughter tracks that accompanied I Love Lucy, The Jackie Gleason Show and the music from The Perry Mason Show. Sometimes, I heard someone ask for their beer or to turn up the sets or some baby crying somewhere. There was always some dog barking no doubt tied up in the back of someone's yard. I used to run into them when I tried to take short cuts now and then. They always sounded so lonely.

D.H. Lawrence said all that I wanted to say in his short poem, "People". His poem made me feel sad for those who were imprisoned in those track homes.

I took so many walks and never regretted not being able to stay in my family's home. I remember one walk in which a falling star touched the top of a tree next to me. I remember so many beautiful skies that reminded me of the stories I read of Greek Mythology. I remember one boy named Mike Sweeny who I had this crush on made fun of me for walking as he got out of his parents car and walked into his parents' house. Even that did not bother me. The sky was so splendid that night.

"The Time Before Death" By Kabir

The Time Before Death
By Kabir (Version by Robert Bly)

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think...and think...while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghost will do it after?

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten--
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then'
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity for the longing for the Guest that
does all of the work'
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.





Kabir is not easily categorized as a Sufi or a Yogi. He is revered by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. He is considered a bridge between the traditions that are in India and Pakistan. Kabir says of himself that he is, "at once the child of Allah and Ram."

He was born in Varanasi (Benares), India, probably around the year 1440 (though other accounts place his birth as early as 1398), to Muslim parents. But early in his life Kabir became a disciple of the Hindu bhakti saint Ramananda. It was unusual for a Hindu teacher to accept a Muslim student, but folklore says the young Kabir found a creative way to overcome all objections.

The story is told that on one particular day of the year, anyone can become a disciple by having a master speak the name of God over him. It is common for those who live near the Ganges to take their morning bath there in the sacred waters. The bhakti saint Ramananda took his bath as he did every day, by arising before dawn. On this special day, Ramananda awoke before dawn and found his customary way down to the steps of the Ganges. As he was walking down the steps to the waters, a little hand reached out in the predawn morning and grabbed the saint's big toe. Ramananda was taken by surprise and he expressed his shock by calling out the name of God. Looking down he saw in the early morning light the hand of the young Kabir. After his bath in the early light he noticed that on the back of the little one's hand was written in Arabic the name Kabir. He adopted him as son and disciple and brought him back to his ashrama, much to the disturbance of his Hindu students, some of whom left in righteous protest.

It is said that in other stories what really made this meeting the most special is that in this case it, was only after Kabir's enlightenment that Ramananda, his teacher, became enlightened.

Not much is known about what sort of spiritual training Kabir may have received. He did not become a sadhu or rununciate. Kabir never abandoned worldly life, choosing instead to live the balanced life of a householder and mystic, tradesman and contemplative. Kabir was married, had children, and lived the simple life of a weaver.

Although Kabir labored to bring the often clashing religious cultures of Islam and Hinduism together, he was equally disdainful of professional piety in any form. This earned him the hatred and persecution of the religious authorities in Varanasi. Nearing age 60, he was denounced before the king but, because of his Muslim birth, he was spared execution and, instead, banished from the region.

He subsequently lived a life of exile, traveling through northern India with a group of disciples. In 1518, he died at Maghar near Gorakhpur.

One of the most loved legends associated with Kabir is told of his funeral. Kabir's disciples disputed over his body, the Muslims wanting to claim the body for burial, the Hindus wanting to cremate the body. Kabir appeared to the arguing disciples and told them to lift the burial shroud. When they did so, they found fragrant flowers where the body had rested. The flowers were divided, and the Muslims buried the flowers while the Hindus reverently committed them to fire.

I Am By John Clare(1793-1864)

John Clare (1793-1864) was born into a peasant family in Helpston, England. Although he was the son of illiterate parents, Clare received some formal schooling. While earning money through such manual labor as ploughing and threshing, he published several volumes of poetry, including Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. After suffering from delusions, Clare was admitted to an insane asylum where he spent the final 20 years of his life.

I Am!

by John Clare

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie

The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

Winter -Lull by D.H. Lawrence

Winter-Lull
By D.H. Lawrence




Because of the silent snow, we are all hushed
Into awe.
No sound of guns nor overhead no rushed
Vibration to draw
Our attention out of the void wherein we are crushed.

A crow floats past on level wings
Noiselessly,
Uninterrupted silence swings
Invisibly, inaudibly
To and fro in our misgivings.

We do not look at each other, we hide
Our daunted eyes.
White earth, and ruins, ourselves, and nothing besides...
It all belies
Our existence; we wait, and are still denied.

We are folded together, men and the snowy ground
Into nullity,
There is silence, only the silence, never a sound
Nor a verity
To assist us; disastrously silence-bound!

1919

I read an essay on the poems of winter in which the writer described as a form of death and the essayist gave examples of poems that treated winter as death. I had to admit this was true, but I was reminded of the above poem by D.H. Lawrence that seemed to treat winter as silence but in the end as a form of death as well.

We are in the season of winter and it is a time for me to sit inside and enjoy looking outside my window with my blanket across my lap near the heat drinking hot coffee or tea. Snow falls and I fancy that I can hear it before I get up in the morning and pull the blinds because I don't hear anything at all. All is quiet. There are no cars or trucks driving past my house. Everything is silent. Winter is the season of quiet especially when the snow is falling and everyone is home, the ice forming on the edges of the house and the highway in the distance has been closed at least for awhile.

In a heavy snowstorm, the electricity sometimes goes out and the candles are brought out and the wood is put in the fireplace. It is a time for thinking and reflecting. We go within ourselves and wait. No one is going anyplace because the driveway is full of snow. In our lives, distraction is the rule; but there is no distraction as we sit watching the snow blow against the windows and huddle in the blankets. There is only silence, never a sound until the relief when the electricity comes on and when the storm stops and the snow plows are out on the roads. Our eyes look to the garage where the snow shovels are kept.

Sometimes, I wonder how it was for people a few hundred years ago when there was no electricity to come on. It would have been like death to listen to the snow blow against the window panes and the walls of the house and for many people to hear the wolves in the distance. There would have been no phone to ring or no one you could call. Silence would have been more pronounced, more apparent and more deadly.

Pomegranate by D.H. Lawrence

Pomegranate
By D.H.Lawrence

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek
women,
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in
flower,
O so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice,
Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes,
In the dense foliage of the inner garden
Pomegranates like bright green stone,
And Barbed, barbed with a crown.
Oh, crown of spiked green metal
Actually growing!

Now in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

San Gervasio in Tuscany 1923



D.H. Lawrence' s novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, and literary criticism earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his “savage pilgrimage.” The first lines of this poem is

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.


Although at his early death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, “The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.” Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical “great tradition” of the English novel. Much has been made of his book, Lady Chatterly's Lover which is about a woman who falls in love with her husband's game keeper but it is also about the changes in England after World War I. It helped break down the laws of censorship both in Europe and in this country.

I find this poem Lawrence's declaration that he is right about his work and ideas and he uses the Pomegranate to talk about his ideas about love and passion. I see this poem as an artist's right to artistic and creative freedom no matter what the subject is and what others think is morally correct.