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 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.

Winter has seemed to be everywhere, even though in reality our separation occurred during summer and fall, when the earth produces plant life like a widow giving birth after the death of her husband.

Yet I saw these fruits of nature as hopeless orphans, since it could not be summer unless you were here; since you were away, even the birds did not sing, or rather sang so plaintively that they made the very leaves look pale, thinking of winter.

It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions.

Hilton Landry groups the sonnet with others, such as 54 and 55, in which the speaker is forced to call to mind an inferior mental substitute for his absent beloved.