The fifth turn

Driving to Ann Arbor to pick up my daughter  J  Here’s the fifth one:

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V

  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.

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The volta is the but at the beginning of the closing couplet.  The whole poem is beautiful in its slow build-up and understatement, but I have miles to drive before I sleep, so I’ll leave now  J