What’s in the brain, that ink may character,
Which hath not figur’d to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love, or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o’er the very same;
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallow’d thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case,
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page;
Finding the first conceit of love there bred,
Where time and outward form would show it dead.
In plain English
The speaker has already written down everything his mind can express about his love and the boy's worth. There's nothing new left to say, no fresh words waiting to be recorded.
Yet he must return to these same declarations every day, like someone repeating a prayer. He counts nothing as stale or worn out—the boy is his, he is the boy's—exactly as when he first blessed and celebrated the boy's beauty.
This is how eternal love works: it wraps itself in fresh language and feeling each time, refusing to be dulled by time's damage or the body's aging. Love finds the original spark of desire still burning bright, even where time and physical decline would suggest it should be dead.
