Theme: Young Man
Content: Encouragement for the subject to have children in light of fast-passing time.
- “Time has brought you to your prime but Time will also take away that beauty.”
- Time is shown to be all-pervading covering the past, present and future in: did, doth and Will.
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 everywhere.
- “You are in the abundantly beautiful Summer of your life but barren Winter inevitably lies ahead.”
- Virile, life-giving items such as sap, lusty leaves and beauty are neutered by the bleak and barren winter just as the subject's virility will eventually decay and be unable to propagate life.
- Time is now directly referenced, changing from Those hours in Q1.
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.
- “Beauty frozen and trapped in winter leaves no memory of itself.”
- Beautiful analogy of the subject’s beauty being frozen at the time of its death, symbolised by winter. Probably inspired by Sidney's poetry comparing summer's beayuty contained in a crystal glass.
- The son that the author encourages the subject to sire is literally imprisoned in the word prisoner "walled in" by pri and er.
- Heavy emphasis of the negative consequences of the subject not having children in Nor...nor no
But flowers distilled,
though they with winter meet,
Lose but their show; their substance still
lives sweet.
- “But flowers that have propagated, though they meet their winter, retain their substance.”
- Beautiful analogy of how beauty is propagated by flowers.
- Still is echoed in Q3's distillation and the couplet's distilled.
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net