Sonnet 5: Those Hours, That with Gentle Work Did Frame
Sonnet 5: Those Hours, That with Gentle Work Did Frame - meaning Summary
Beauty Threatened by Time
Shakespeare warns that time inevitably destroys youthful beauty, turning summer into winter and stripping life and color away. He contrasts Time’s tyrannous, consuming power with a conserving practice: distillation. By preserving a flower’s essence in liquid or memory, beauty’s substance survives even if its outward show fades. The sonnet argues that while appearance is transient, a preserved core—whether scent or remembrance—retains value beyond temporal decay.
Read Complete AnalysesThose 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 checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o’ersnowed 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 distilled, though they with winter meet, Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.