How like a winter hath my absence been    From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year    What freezing have I felt, what dark days seen    With 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 widowed wombs    after their Lord's decease       Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me    But hope of Orphans, and unfathered 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