Skip to content

Sonnet 5: Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

William Shakespeare·1564–1616
Lines:14Movement:English Renaissance
Those hours, that with gentle work did frameThe lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,Will play the tyrants to the very sameAnd that unfair which fairly doth excel;For never-resting time leads summer onTo hideous winter, and confounds him there;Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where: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.