I’ve been dipping into Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s All the Sonnets of Shakespeare. As ever, I find this one particularly gripping:

……….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.

You just need to say this with feeling to feel its power. Phrase after phrase, line after line seems to nail intense feelings in a way that combines extreme concentration and focus with expansiveness. The metaphor of winter and the flatly relentless tread of the opening swallows you into the poet-lover’s present depression but ‘the pleasure of the fleeting year’ cuts through that gloomy stillness like a momentary flash of joy and light, simultaneously here and gone, like an afterimage on the retina. Gloom tightens its grip again in the next two lines, the images of freezing darkness reinforced by repetition of the ‘ee’ syllable. In the following quatrains, when images of summer’s abundance wrestle in vain with the poet’s sense of emptiness, it’s important that they do put up a real fight against it – the swelling syllables of ‘the teeming autumn, big with rich increase’ make one feel how much summer offers, if only the poet had been more receptive. ‘Summer and his pleasures wait on thee, / And thou away, the very birds are mute’ is devastating in the simplicity and force of its metaphors. But the final thrust is perhaps even more devastating. ‘Or if they sing’ steps down from the hyperbole of the birds’ silence, giving an impression of the poet’s changing to precisely measured exactitude, only to release the metaphor of winter in a more keenly infelt way – ‘leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near’.

If we divide a metaphor into tenor and vehicle, the idea being expressed and the image that expresses it, we presumably think of the vehicle as subordinate to, existing for the sake of the tenor, the main thrust of the idea. What’s so thrilling about this poem is how fully the images of winter seem to exist for their own sake. It always reminds me of Thomas Nashe’s haunting lyric from Summer’s Last Will and Testament,

……….AUTUMN hath all the summer’s fruitful treasure ;
……….Gone is our sport, fled is poor Croydon’s pleasure.
……….Short days, sharp days, long nights come on apace,—
……….Ah, who shall hide us from the winter’s face?
……….Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
……….And here we lie, God knows, with little ease.
……………From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord deliver us!

……….London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn ;
……….Trades cry, Woe worth that ever they were born.
……….The want of term is town and city’s harm ;
……….Close chambers we do want to keep us warm.
……….Long banished must we live from our friends ;
……….This low-built house will bring us to our ends.
……………From winter, plague, and pestilence, good Lord deliver us!

and of the refrain from another:

………Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year,
……….The earth is hell when thou leav’st to appear.

‘Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year’: so piercing in a way I can’t explain, beyond saying that its broken meter seems to throw extra emphasis on all its words and particularly to heighten the contrast between the ‘bright soul’ and ‘sad year’, making more vivid the movement between attempting to hold the passing joy and sinking into the sense of loss when its gone. Shakespeare’s ‘summer and his pleasures wait on thee’ is quieter, less piercing outcry, more reflection and therefore more susceptible of analysis. ‘Wait’ is key here, I think. Dominant sense, that the beloved is a lord of beauty and joy, attended by summer and its pleasures as his servants, clients or subordinate friends. But there’s an under-suggestion that Shakespeare must wait for the beloved to bring summer to him.