Shakespeare's answer to ageing in Sonnet 5 is a bottle of perfume
Time, in Sonnet 5, is a craftsman who spends years shaping a lovely face and then turns tyrant and wrecks it. Summer is marched into winter. The only thing that escapes is summer's essence trapped in glass: distilled flowers lose their looks but keep their sweetness. Beauty survives by being concentrated.
The opening quatrain sets up a cruel reversal. The same hours that patiently framed a gaze everyone admires will later play the tyrant to it, making ugly what now excels in fairness. Shakespeare packs the reversal into the wordplay of unfair and fairly, so the sentence itself flips from praise to ruin.
The second quatrain widens the view to the whole year. Never-resting time leads summer onward into hideous winter and abandons it there. The images pile up with a bleak economy: sap stopped by frost, lush leaves stripped away, beauty buried under snow, bareness on every side. No human face is mentioned, yet the reader understands that the garden is a portrait of a body growing old.
Then comes the escape route. Were it not for summer's distillation, a liquid prisoner held within walls of glass, beauty and every memory of it would be lost together. The poem closes on the consolation: "But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet, / Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet." Leese is an old form of lose. The petals go, but the scent endures.
Read as a love poem to a young man, the perfume works as a figure for offspring: a concentrated copy that outlasts the original's decay. Shakespeare's own family began early. At 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26; the Diocese of Worcester's consistory court issued the licence on 27 November 1582, and the banns were read only once rather than the usual three times, suggesting a hurried arrangement.
Source: Sonnet 5: Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
