Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 5 is from early in the sequence of verses written to the Young Man.  The Poet is still trying to convince the Young Man to marry and reproduce, thereby preserving his beauty.  Here the Bard compares that beauty to the most lovely things of summer, flowers.  But flowers are transient. Winter destroys all blossoms, in the same way Time destroys youthful beauty.  Sometimes though, one aspect of a flower’s beauty can be saved. The Elizabethan didn’t have cameras to capture images, and so in Shakespeare’s time the only way to preserve any essence of a blossom was to distill it into perfume.

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 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 distilled, though they with winter meet,

   Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.