Sonnet 5: Flowers distilled

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 check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o'ersnow'd 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 distilled though they with winter meet, Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

William Shakespeare

Sonnet 5: Flowers distilled

February 2012


The background story for this sonnet painting on my blog.