The speaker feels caught in a weary paradox: if nothing is ever truly new, then all our mental effort—straining to invent fresh ideas—is just a painful illusion. Our minds, he says, are like a mother tricked into a long labour, only to deliver the same child a second time. There’s a quiet bitterness in that image, a sense of exhaustion.
He daydreams of peering five centuries into the past to see if someone already praised his beloved’s beauty. He genuinely wonders whether we’ve gotten better at such things, whether the ancients were sharper, or if history just spins in place. Yet a rueful confidence breaks through at the end: he suspects earlier poets actually wasted their skill on lesser subjects. The mood is thoughtful and gently melancholy, but it’s held together by the speaker’s stubborn conviction that what stands before him now is worth far more than whatever the old world bothered to admire.