SONNET #5

by: William Shakespeare

HOSE 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 there snow; their substance still lives sweet.