In Shakespeare’s 97th Sonnet, the narrator writes about his separation from his lover: “How like a winter hath my absence been/From thee…”

For some of us, this winter has been a particularly difficult absence from our love.

I speak, of course, of baseball.

But now we are closing in on Opening Day.

Check out the DGV Productions Winter in Fenway below for 2:59 seconds of merging winter, baseball, and Shakespeare.

It’s lovely.

Winter in Fenway (sonnet 97) from DGA Productions on Vimeo.

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(For those of you who want to read William Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 97, I have copied it from my father’s well worn volume of poetry. In doing so, I discovered that he had circled this particular Sonnet – a lagniappe for me indeed.)

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 every where!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden 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.