Today’s Poem: Sonnet 98

A lovers’ separation turns “pied April” to wintertime

Périclès Pantazis, April, c. 1880 (Wikimedia Commons)

The birthday of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), which we celebrate tomorrow, April 23, prompts us to meditate on everything we know about the man, which isn’t all that much. What we don’t know, however, presents a seemingly inexhaustible source of speculation: what religious convictions he held, what sexual tastes he entertained, and much more.

What we know is that the baptism of a son born to John and Mary Shakespeare is recorded in the register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, as having occurred on April 26, 1564. That the child was three days old at the time of his baptism is a matter of tradition, not certainty. Artifacts related to his childhood include an example of a horn book from which he “might have learned to read.” In fact, much of Shakespeare’s biographical narrative consists of things he might have done, between that baptismal day in April 1564 and the day of his death, on what was putatively his fifty-second birthday. 

William Shakespeare, portrait attributed to John Taylor (1581–1651) (Wikimedia Commons)

But in the face of all we don’t know, and of what we venture to think we do know, we have the work itself. The plays and poems shine with a peculiar brilliance not readily evident in the oeuvre of the various other figures to whom Shakespeare’s work and identity are sometimes attributed. Nobody else, however gifted, seems to have quite this particular personality.

Consider, for example, Today’s Poem, 98th of the 154 Shakespearean sonnets published in folio form in 1609. Whatever we do or don’t know about the poet, the poem’s own voice, in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ababcdcdefefgg, speaks, with a straightforwardness and an inversion-loving turn of mind that seems not really like anybody else’s. The poem laments a lovers’ separation that turns the beauties of “pied April” to mere shadows, not reality, and makes of the spring an enduring wintertime. 

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Sonnet 98 

by William Shakespeare 

From you have I been absent in the spring, 
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, 
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, 
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him. 
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell 
Of different flowers in odour and in hue, 
Could make me any summer’s story tell, 
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: 
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, 
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; 
They were but sweet, but figures of delight 
Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those. 
   Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away, 
   As with your shadow I with these did play. 

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