- 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.