Sonnet 5
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 distill'd though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives
sweet.
Sonnet 6
Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer, ere thou be
distilled.
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some
place
With beauty’s treasure, ere it be
self-killed.
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing
loan;
That’s for thyself to breed another
thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.
Ten times thyself were happier than thou
art,
If ten of thine ten times refigured
thee.
Then what could death do if thou
shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-willed, for thou art much
too fair
To be death’s conquest and make worms
thine heir.
Here we have
some themes that one will have already become familiar with, if one were
reading through the sonnets in order. Once again, we are reminded that youth,
vitality and beauty, as symbolized by summer and “lusty leaves,” will not last.
Instead, it will give way to age and decline, as symbolized by winter and
frost.
Once again,
we are eavesdropping on Shakespeare, or at least the voice of the poem,
lecturing the Fair Youth that the remedy of such decline and eventual death as
“make worms thine heir” is to procreate.
What I find distinctive about this couple of sonnets is that the imagery, as
well as the messages conveyed, are particularly strong and a little
melodramatic.
Some of this imagery is incredibly dark and stark.
Summer gives way to “hideous Winter.” “Bareness” is “every where,” and “winter’s
ragged hand” can “deface”. The youth is
urged to avoid “death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.” These are quite a set
of extremely ominous and dreary descriptors for the inevitable decline that we
humans experience.
The imagery is not all negative, however. In colorful terms, Shakespeare
urges the youth to engage in the masculine role of procreation, “Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some
place With beauty’s treasure.”
Perhaps the best example of the heavy handedness of the message occurs when
the subject of the sonnet is actually urged to have ten children, as doing so
will make the subject “ten times happier.”
All of the above makes this set of sonnets particularly engaging and
entertaining to read. Though one might make the argument that Shakespeare goes
a little over the top here, one needs to keep in mind that there are 126 “Fair
Youth Sonnets.” In my commentary on Sonnet 4, which is here, I concluded that the best descriptor for that verse was “clever,” as
opposed to the grandness of some of the other sonnets. Here, we have more
variation. It seems that Shakespeare was using this large body of short poems
to express himself in diverse ways, from the very clever to the soaring sublime,
to what I would argue here is slightly flamboyant. Ultimately, the tone of
these two sonnets makes them a lot of fun to read.
My commentary on additional Sonnets:
