My love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandiz’d, whose rich esteeming,
The owner’s tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue:
Because I would not dull you with my song.
In plain English
The speaker's love has actually grown stronger, even though it looks quieter on the surface. He's not loving less—he's just showing it less openly. Love that gets constantly advertised and bragged about everywhere is cheap love, the kind where the owner won't stop talking about it.
When their love was new, he expressed it freely in poems and songs, the way a nightingale sings brilliantly at the start of summer. But as the season deepens, the bird stops singing—not because summer becomes less beautiful, but because every tree is already full of birdsong, and the sweetness of it wears thin when it's everywhere.
So like that bird, he sometimes stays quiet. He's holding back not from coldness, but to protect what they have from becoming ordinary through constant repetition.
