Sonnet 5 - Meaning and Commentary

The time that it took to gently create

The beautiful face and eyes that everyone looks at,

That time act pitiless and cruel to that same face,

And unfairly take away your gifts, which you fairly received.

For never stopping time takes summer to its end

Which is ugly winter which destroys it (summer)

Like a tree whose once flowing sap is stopped, and whose vibrant leaves have fallen

All her beauty is covered in snow, and all is barren.

Then if the drops of summer (like rose-water*) were not the most pure parts extracted and kept

Like a prisoner in jail, kept in a cell made of ice (winter frozen)

Beauty's fruit (or result) and beauty itself are deprived

So that neither current beauty nor a memory of it exists.

But flowers purified and kept, though winter comes to whither them,

Lose their appearance, their essential parts still exist.

A seasonal sonnet! Here I am in New York City in September, waiting for that seasonal "click" that Carrie Bradshaw talks about, that I longed for in Los Angeles, and I reach a little couplet of seasonal sonnets. Before I was exiled from Brooklyn, and in the brief time where I knew my misery had just begun, I ran every day in Prospect Park. The winter that I could feel quickly dissipating, was my first and harsh. On one particular day, I was running in the rain, feeling like a trooper when I noticed new daffodils being pelted relentlessly by the falling drops. How little they knew that the pain was their very sustenance. The water falling upon them and ripping their new little petals would be everything to make them strong and survive their little lives.

Anyway. Seasons. I. Love. Them.

"Those hours that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

Will play tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel" (1-4)

Shakespeare opens this seasonally rich sonnet by reminding the subject about the fierceness of time. It took long hours to create his unique beauty. Those same hours will slowly tear that beauty away from him as in Sonnets 2 and 3, reducing his "beauties field" to "deep trenches" (2.2).

Shakespeare calls time a tyrant, a pitiless, cruel, hard, despotic or lawless ruler (here I am combining both definitions from my beloved lexicon). Shakespeare personifies time as if she were a woman, fickle; at one moment gentle in creation, the other unfairly destroying that which she created.

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there

Sex is hardly hinted at in this sonnet, and a wonder why not. The seasons are sexes and time a fickle lover. At first a creator, then a flirt, leading the poor beautiful youth to old age's ruin.

I love this metaphor. Summer as Time's ignorant love, led unknowing into "hideous" old age (winter) and then left there to die. Anyone who has been spurned by love understands this. Love, once blooming and full of promise, suddenly becomes rotten and dead.

Sap-checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness everywhere.

I leave you with pictures...a thousand words. My first fall in Brooklyn, NY:

Can you not see lusty leaves?

...and my first winter, not three weeks later:

Dried up and bare. Leaves "quite gone."

Then were not summer's distillation left

A liquid pris'ner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

"Summer's distillation" means the evaporation of the pure youth of the season frozen by winter. We have the water in the ice to look upon and see what it once was. Distillate is also how perfume is made. Rosewater is made by the process of evaporation and the perfume is held in a vile made of glass, hence "walls of glass." If there is no memory of summer, kept by some process that then holds it in time, the beauty is wasted, without any remembrance of it.

But flowers though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.

This sonnet is straightforward. I am thinking about my theory that Shakespeare, as Francis Meres put it, "sugared sonnets among his private friends" as a kind of joke and a means to help his friend Wriothesley through troubled times. A sonnet like this is much more subtle than Sonnet 3 or 4. In fact. They are clearly for different audiences. There is nothing laughable or bawdy in this sonnet. Shakespeare wastes only one line praising the beauty of our youth. For most of the poem he weaves an intricate sonnet involving an affair between summer and winter, where summer is cuckolded. It makes sense for a piece like this to be handed in to the Lord Chamberlain. It does not make sense to show him sonnet 3 or 4. That the sonnets were written at the same time, I cannot say, however they are clearly not all written for the same purpose.