Sonnet 5
The Case for Posterity
- 1 Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
- 2 The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
- 3 Will play the tyrants to the very same
- 4 And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
- 5 For never-resting time leads summer on
- 6 To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
- 7 Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
- 8 Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
- 9 Then were not summer's distillation left,
- 10 A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
- 11 Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
- 12 Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
- 13 But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
- 14 Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.