Sonnet 5 claims that time will destroy the young man’s beauty as surely as winter destroys summer, and that only a distillation, like perfume pressed from flowers, can keep beauty’s substance alive after its outward form is gone.
Sonnet 5: Full Poem
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’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.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 5 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 5 Means
Sonnet 5 steps back from the young man and describes what time does to everything beautiful, then offers one way to survive it.
The first quatrain presents a reversal. The hours that carefully shaped the young man’s lovely face, the one every eye lingers on, will turn into tyrants against that same face. They will make ugly what now excels in beauty.
The second quatrain explains why, using the seasons. Time never rests. It leads summer on into hideous winter and destroys it there: the sap stopped by frost, the thick leaves gone, beauty buried under snow, and bareness everywhere.
The third quatrain imagines what would happen without one exception. If summer’s distillation were not left behind, perfume held like a liquid prisoner inside glass walls, then beauty’s effect would vanish along with beauty itself. Neither beauty nor any memory of what it had been would remain.
The couplet gives the consolation. Flowers that have been distilled lose only their outward show when winter comes; their substance lives on, still sweet. The application is left unspoken, and Sonnet 6 makes it: the young man must be “distilled” in a child before winter reaches him.
Sonnet 5 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 5 sets aside the scolding of the earlier Procreation Sonnets, and its themes are about time and what survives it.
Time the Maker and the Destroyer
The same hours that built the young man’s beauty “with gentle work” will become its tyrants. Time is not punishing anyone; it simply builds in one direction and unmakes in the other. The poem states this as a fact of nature, as certain as summer turning to winter.
Show and Substance
The couplet makes a new distinction in the sequence. Winter takes a flower’s “show,” its petals and color, but not its “substance,” the scent that distillation preserves. Sonnet 1 and Sonnet 3 worried about preserving the young man’s face. Sonnet 5 suggests that what matters is the essence the face expressed.
Memory
Line 12 raises the stakes beyond appearance: without distillation, not only beauty but “no remembrance what it was” would survive. The poem’s fear is not just that beauty ends, but that it ends without trace, leaving nothing even to recall it.
Form and Language
Sonnet 5 is built on two sustained images, the seasons and the perfume still, and it is unusual for whom it leaves out.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Line 11 opens with a stressed syllable, “Beauty’s,” reversing the usual rhythm, so the word lands with extra weight just as the poem imagines beauty being lost.
A Poem Without “Thou”
Sonnets 1 to 4 all speak directly to the young man. Sonnet 5 never does: there is no “thou,” “thee,” or “you” anywhere in it. The young man is present only as “the lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell.” The absence makes the poem sound less like an argument and more like a description of the way things are.
The Hours
“Those hours” may recall the Hours of classical myth, goddesses who presided over the seasons and brought things to ripeness. Here they are first craftsmen, framing beauty with “gentle work,” and then “tyrants.” The change of role in three lines is the whole of the first quatrain’s argument.
“A Liquid Prisoner Pent in Walls of Glass”
The image is of perfume or rosewater, distilled from flowers and kept in a glass bottle. The bottle is a prison, but a prison that saves its prisoner. Confinement and survival are held in one line, and the paradox sets up the couplet’s promise that substance outlives show.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 5 is officially about children, but its central image fits poetry better than parenthood, and the sequence will eventually notice.
Consider what distillation does. It does not reproduce a flower. It takes the flower’s essential quality, its scent, separates it from the petals and stem, and fixes it in a form that no longer looks like a flower at all. A child is a poor match for that. A child is a whole new living thing, with its own show and its own winter to come. What survives winter as pure essence, stripped of the body, sealed in a container, is something closer to a text.
Line 12 makes the fit clearer. Without distillation, the poem says, there would be “Nor it nor no remembrance what it was”: not the beauty, and not even the memory of it. That is exactly what verse claims to prevent. A poem cannot keep a face, but it can keep a remembrance of what the face was. In Sonnet 54, the speaker makes the connection openly, telling the young man that when his beauty fades, “by verse distills your truth.”
So Sonnet 5, placed among the poems urging marriage, quietly contains the idea that will replace them. The poem that says only a distillation can save beauty is itself a small bottle of it. Four centuries on, the young man’s show is long gone and his name is unknown, but the “lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell” is still here, sealed in fourteen lines.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 5, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 5 Addressed To?
No one directly. It never says “thou” or “you,” but it concerns the young man of the Fair Youth sonnets, whose “lovely gaze” is the beauty time will destroy.
What Is “Summer’s Distillation”?
Perfume or rosewater, made by distilling the essence of summer flowers and storing it in glass. It keeps the flowers’ scent long after the flowers themselves have died.
What Does “Leese” Mean?
Lose. The couplet says distilled flowers “leese but their show”: they lose only their outward appearance, while their substance survives.
What Does Line 12 Mean?
“Nor it nor no remembrance what it was” means that, without distillation, neither beauty itself nor any memory of what it had been would remain.
How Is Sonnet 5 Connected to Sonnet 6?
They are a pair. Sonnet 5 describes distillation in general; Sonnet 6 applies it to the young man, urging him not to let winter deface his summer “ere thou be distilled.”
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets frame Sonnet 5’s images of winter and distillation.