(Photo Courtesy of Jenni Sweat, Flickr)

 [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 everywhere.

[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 distilled, though they with winter meet,

[14]     Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

 

First Stanza: The Promised Reversal

This sonnet raises a variant on the theme of the need for beauty to make itself again in a child. In the first sonnet, the world as a whole will be the less. In the second sonnet, a child is promised as a comfort (“And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.”). In the third sonnet, after death, there will be no remembrance of you. In the fourth sonnet, the loss is to nature. All of these losses are abstracted from the object of the sonnet: the world will be the less. Here in the fifth, the certain reversal of beauty is promised (unless preserved).

[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;

The lines are bit cryptic: The first question is what sort of “work” was done to “frame/The lovely gaze”? It could potentially be the work of gestation, or the act of growing up: “the lovely gaze where eye doth dwell” could refer to the visage of the object of the poem.  But the “lovely gaze” could also refer to the act of gazing by third parties: the work is the fact of others looking upon the object.

The answer to the question depends upon the identity of the “tyrants.” If “lovely gaze” is the visage (the thing gazed upon), then the “tyrants” are the hours of work: All the life which at first worked to create your beauty will in the end turn upon you and become the hours of pain.

If the “lovely gaze” is the gaze of third persons, then the tyrants are those observers, those who look upon the beauty. An argument could be made for both positions: and such a purposeful ambiguity is the sort of complexity which makes Shakespeare fascinating. The ambiguity is more than just a clever wordplay; the ambiguity draws the subjective beauty and the objective admiration into a union of parts which each hangs upon the other.

I think the weight leans to the visage, because it makes more sense to spend “gentle hours” upon the creation of a visage rather than the creation of a gaze. But living in a fame and appearance obsessed world, the idea of hours being spent in the creation of a gaze makes sense: the beauty is not just there in the object, the beauty is in the relationship to those who gaze upon it.

The last line then promises the reversal: The beauty – “fair” – will become ugly; the exceeding of the “fair” will have a balanced and equivalent fall. But again, the admiration of the world can quickly turn to distain. You see, both readings make good sense of the lines.

Second Stanza: The Mechanics of the Fall

[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 everywhere.

In this stanza, time is made out to be a robber who leads a naïve summer into the dangerous alley of “hideous winter”, summer is dry-gulched by time. Time will “confound”, that is ruin, the beauty of summer. This image of  time “confounding” beauty is used elsewhere by Shakespeare: Sonnet 60, line 8, “And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.” Sonnet 63, line 10, “Against confounding age’s cruel knife.”

The use of confound in this manner was contemporaneous to Shakespeare. The Geneva Bible, has the line, “Let them be confounded & put to shame, that seke my soule: let them be turned backewarde and put to rebuke, that desire mine hurt.” Ps. 70:2.

The beauty of summer’s growth (“lusty leaves”) will be “quite gone” and covered in snow.

There is an interesting use of the word “lusty” in contradistinction to an eventual reversal:

HOW DOCTOR FAUSTUS COMPLAYNED THAT HEE SHOULD IN HIS LUSTY TIME AND YOUTHFUL YEARES DIE SO MISERABLY. CHAP. 59.

THis sorrowfull time drawing neere so troubled Doctor Faustus, that he began to write his minde, to the ende he might peruse it often and not forget it and is in maner as followeth.

Ah Faustus, thou sorrowful and wofull man, now must thou goe to the damned company in vnquenchable fire, whereas thou mightest haue had the ioyfull immortalitie of the soule, the which thou now hast lost. Ah grosse vnderstanding and wilfull will, what seazeth on my limmes other than a robbing of my life’: Bewayle with me my sound & healthfull body,

wit and soule, bewayle with me my sences, for you haue had your part and pleasure as well as I. Oh enuie and disdaine, how haue you crept both at once into me, and now for your sakes I must suffer all these torments? Ah whither is pitie and mercy fled’: Vpon what occasion hath heauen repayed me with this reward by sufferance to suffer me to perish Wherefore was I created a man’: The punishment that I see prepared for me of my selfe now must I suffer. Ah miserable wretch, there is nothing in this world to shew me comfort: then woe is me, what helpeth my wayling.

Faust Book (Medford, MA: Perseus Digital Library, 5/12/97). The Faust Book was published in Germany in 1587 and was soon translated into English, were it apparently became the basis of Marlowe’s play by that name.

Third Stanza: Beauty’s Potential Preservation

[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.

The “distillation” of summer would be some sort of perfume: some liquid distillation of the summer kept in a bottle (walls of glass). Thus, in Cymbeline, the Queen says:

                                    I wonder, doctor,

Thou ask’st me such a question. Have I not been

Thy pupil long? Hast thou not learned me how

To make perfumes, distil, preserve—yea, so

That our great king himself doth woo me oft For

For my confections?

Act I, scene 5. The perfume has an effect upon desire.

Here, without such a perfume summer’s beauty will have no further effect. Thus, the effect of beauty is short-lived. It is a summer thing soon to be ruined by the great bandit time.

The poem is a sort of response to youth’s belief that it will never fail; that time will never come for me.

The Couplet: The Preservation of Beauty

[13]     But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

[14]     Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Here Shakespeare does something interesting: In the beginning “beauty” is all in the “gaze”, it is something developed and shown; beauty is scene. Then by the image of “distillation”, he transforms the concept of beauty into something separate from bare appearance. There is a “show” of beauty and the “substance” of beauty.

 

If summer beauty is distilled, its substance will preserved despite time, being kept in “walls of glass”. Yes, flowers who come to winter “leese [lose] their show [appearance].” Yet, even though appearance is lost; the substance is maintained. In fact it not merely persists it “still lives sweet”.

 

The image pushed back into reality means that while you cannot stop time from ruing your physical beauty; the true substance of your, which is a substance in life, can be preserved by a child who carries the beauty into the future.