Shakespeare's 5th Sonnet (Hardcore Analysis) (Patreon)

Shakespeare's fifth sonnet is a rather special one. 

I personally love the wintry syntax and the metaphor of a "liquid prisoner," and would love to know what you make of this sonnet too.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 why the fifth and sixth sonnets are one poem
• 1:30 why sonnet five is special 
• 3:00 reading the sonnet together
• 4:00 what made me fall in love with Shakespeare
• 5:00 metrical/syntactical metaphors 
• 6:00 enjambment and spondees 
• 8:00 "liquid prisoner"
• 9:00 metaphor as the highest level of thought
• 11:00 the procreation sequence as overture
• 11:30 how to rank the sonnets 
• 13:00 Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
• 14:45 Shakespeare's love of opposites
• 15:20 the couplet to sonnet five

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 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.

Shakespeare's Sonnet Project

• Sonnet I 
• Sonnet II 
• Sonnet III 
• Sonnet IV 

As always, let us know if you have a favourite line, image, or sentiment from this fifth sonnet.

Happy sonneteering!