Never-Resting Time

In this sonnet, Shakespeare’s discussion of the relationship between winter and summer intrigued me. Despite winter bringing “bareness everywhere,” the flower’s “substance still lives sweet.” In my interpretation of this poem, I focused on this dichotomy through harmonic structure. The beginning of the piece is simple in tonality, but as the poem describes winter, the harmonic language becomes increasingly dissonant. When the discussion of summer returns, the harmonic structure echoes the simplistic beginning, adding embellishing tones, reflecting summer’s increased beauty after the poet has experienced winter. Writing this piece reminded me that we so often take simple things for granted, which is especially potent during this quarantine. (text below)

Sonnet V - William Shakespeare

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 cheque'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.