William Shakespeare
1564-1616
Sonnet V
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'er-snowed
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 distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
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