Shakespeare's Sonnets: V

We describe our lives like the seasons – spring and summer we grow and flourish and then begin to fade with autumn and breathe our last in the winter of our life. What do we have to show for our lives? Have we distilled summer’s beauty in such a way that we have something to be remembered by?

Sonnet V

Those hours that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere:

Then, were not summer’s distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.