Falling out of love, William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 – discovering poetry

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 removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn big with rich increase
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lord’s decease.
Yet this abundant issue seemed 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.

Spring is a strange time for a break-up. ‘Rejoice!’ says the earth, ‘the world is full of hope!’. But your heart says no, no it is all over. That is how the speaker of this sonnet sees things.

If your eye skips over the word ‘like’ in the first line, you might at first think that they are addressing the spring itself.