5
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 checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’er-snowed 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, not no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
General
The first thing to note about Sonnet 5 is that it should be read with Sonnet 6 with which it forms a pair - the 'Then' of Sonnet 6 informs us that the speaker is carrying on his argument. Considered as a pair it is easier to see the grander design of the movement, from impersonal to personal. As HV says it is as though the logic of Sonnet 5 generates Sonnet 6: ‘The splendidly achieved aesthetic shape of sonnet 5 is conferred by the speaker’s stereoptical comprehension (with ‘divining eyes’) of past , present, and future time in one gaze.’ Secondly, this is one of the few impersonal sonnets in the sequence.
Sense
First quatrain
Just as the hours – possibly seasons – have tenderly framed/constructed that beautiful object to look where every eye turns/lingers, they will also be tyrannical to that beauty, and unfairly treat/make ugly/make illegitimate that which excels all beauty.
1.hours: disyllabic – Q= howers. Cf Sonnet 60.8-12:
And time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow
gentle: mild, seemingly tender, - to be contrasted with the harsh ‘working’ of time in age (lines 3-8)
2. gaze: object raptly looked on (JK)
4.unfair: (a) treat unfairly (b) make unfair/deprive of beauty (like a tyrant) CB: ‘the verbal innovation makes shocking the suddenness with which the gentle hours turn into destructive tyrants.’ – only example of this transitive verb in OED.
This first quatrain sets up the idea of time as deceiver and then importantly as tyrant. WS, like other writers of his time is very concerned with ideas around the inability to stop time and its effects.
Second quatrain
For never-resting time leads summer on, as it were in a dance of the hours but then the more sinister implications of to lead on emerge, as in to entice or beguile (CB). Summer is led into dreadful winter where it is utterly destroyed, where growth/reproduction is stopped by the frost, leaves fall and beauty is hidden beneath snow, everything bare.
5-8: Cf: Sonnet 97.1-4:
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 everywhere
This is relevant for its reference to the passing of time in seasonal terms and how the seasons translate to the body – although WS does not make this as explicit in Sonnet 5, in the context of the first 17 sonnets, the implication is that the young man must reproduce before he is consumed by 'December's bareness'.
As ever, though, the original reference is to Ovid Meta XV (Golding) 212-13:
Then ugly winter last
Like age steals on with trembling steps, all bald, or overcast
With shirle thin hair as white as show. Our bodies also ay
Do alter still from time to time, and never stand at stay.
6. hideous: in its original sense – to cause dread or horror (KDJ)
confounds: utterly destroys (word also used in Sonn 19 as in ref below)
7. sap: humours associated with nature – sap drying out in winter. Cf 15.5-7 'as plants increase...Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease'
leaves: note how this will become left in line 9 – WS plays with this word elsewhere in the sonnets (see SB for numerous refs)
8.o-er-snowed: cf Sonnet 1 – beauty’s rose is now covered in snow, with intimations of barrenness.
As seen in the extract from Sonnet 97 above, WS sometimes likes expressing this concern with the relentless passing of time here and elsewhere in terms of the body as nature, especially the tree. There is another pertinent example in Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bared ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Third quatrain
If it wasn’t that the summer survives in the form of bottled perfume – imprisoned in a glass bottle, then the chief effect of beauty – i.e. its beautiful scent, would die at the same time as beauty - the rose – itself, leaving us with neither beauty nor any means of recalling it (CB). Vend comments that: ‘by the insistence on instrumental distillation as the only possible preserving of beauty, he explicitly forbids any recourse to the idea of a recurring organic spring. Though nature is in fact cyclical, not all metaphorical uses of nature in poetry invoke its cyclicity, not by any means.’
9.distillation: the idea of perfume cf MWW 3.5.104 as below. KDJ glosses as rose-water, much used in Elizabethan cookery and medicine. Cf. Sidney New Arcadia 333
‘Have you ever seen a pure Rosewater kept in a crystal glass; how fine it lookes, how sweet it smells, while that beautiful glass imprisons it? Break the prison, and let the water take his own course, doth it not embrace dust, and lose all his former sweetness, and fairness? Truly so are we, if we have not the stay, rather then the restraint of Cristalline marriage.’
10. JK though says that WS ‘makes the vial an emblem not of married chastity but of what Sonnet 1 calls increase: it is the child who will preserve his father’s beauty (5.9-14), or the procreative womb of that child’s mother (6.3-4)’
left: remaining
11. bereft: lost/ snatched away (SB)
12.Note absence of main verb in this sentence – reflecting the distillation process. JK calls this line ‘elliptical and ambiguous’.
The idea of preserving through distillation/perfume is also use in Sonnet 54:
But for their virtue only is their show
They live unwooed, and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not do so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made;
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth;
When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.
Couplet
14. Leese: lose (archaic) –‘doubtless employed for a pun of ‘lease’(JK)
substance: essence – also:
(a)CB makes point leese probably also infers ideas of preservation of an estate – possessions, goods etc .
(b) ‘More show than substance’ = proverbial.
(c) Could also relate to Platonic theory of ideas/forms. SB: ‘what we ordinarily take for reality is not reality; the particulars we perceive are only shadows (images, reflections) of the substance (ideas,forms) manifested in, and distorted by, the dross of physicality….The most celebrated of the Platonic forms is the idea of the good, of beauty, the disembodied substance of which each particular beautiful thing is only a partial and flawed reflection.’ (SB, 53 headnote) In this it relates to Sonnet 53:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
still: (a) nevertheless (b) always/forever; echoes distilled, and gains additional permanence for the echo (CB)
sweet: (a) beautifully scented (b) uncorrupted, wholesome
Links with other sonnets
Gen: Sonnets 6, 12, 18, 19, 60 for ideas of time as tyrant and 73 for idea of seasons
1.4.hours: cf 60.8
5-8. Sonnet 97.1-4:
7. Sap checked: cf 15.6
9-14. cf Sonnet 54.9-14
14. substance: cf Sonnet 53
Links with other works by WS
9. distillation: MWW 3.5.104: ‘And then to be stopped in, like a strong distillation’ – the word more often refers to the process than its outcome (CB)
Links with works by other authors
5.8.Ovid Meta 15.233ff (Golding trans)
10. P Sidney New Arcadia, 333
