To talk about not being able to talk about something is known as aporia.

This is a fantastic ending: punchy and direct.

He has spent 14 lines waxing poetic about waxing poetic and he doesn’t even talk about the loved one. He’s too wrapped up in his world of poetry and ideas to notice.

The poet finally comes clean and tells the loved one: I love the idea of being in love with you more than I love you.

Yikes.

It doesn’t sound like he’ll have to be concerned with all this love nonsense after the lover hears that!

This couplet is evocative of Shakespeare’s famous habit of self-referencing endings:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

“Except by wasting all my time thinking about love instead of loving”

pelf- money, riches

The metaphor here is that there is a certain amount of love, as if it were an amount of money, and he is wasting it all on thinking about perfecting (or rich-dressing) his love instead of just loving.

“My understanding of love (through literature, reflection, etc.) couldn’t improve my actual experience of being in love,”

OK, here’s a difficult couple of lines.
But hold on, because it’s pretty interesting.

So first, What consciousness makes more by consciousness, means “The more I know about love by being aware that I’m in love…”

And next, It makes it less, for it makes it less itself, means “My awareness actually detracts from my love, because it makes the love less genuine.”

Intuitively, being aware that you’re in love would make you appreciate your love more. You’d say, “Hey, I’m in love. How pleasant!”. But for this poet’s soul, he says “Hey, I’m in love. What does that mean? Can I think of characters in literature who were in love? Can I compare myself to characters who were in love?” And suddenly he finds himself interpreting his love through poetry rather than just appreciating it.

Again, very meta

Read this along with the previous clause, I could not tell thee well of how I love.
So, I could not tell thee well of how I love, were all my self my love and no thought love to prove.

Basically, this is saying “I couldn’t tell you how much I love you even if I didn’t have any thoughts and simply loved you.”

His preoccupation with proving his love through poetry doesn’t detract from how much loves this person. He just can’t put it into words.

This phrase actually employs the figure of speech, parenthesis, in which a sentence is interrupted by a “parenthetical”. Normally this rhetorical device is indicated with the punctuation marks by the same name:(Parentheses).

It’s easier to understand these lines if you imagine these words in parenthesis.
The speaker is telling this person that he didn’t love them any less just because he knew that he couldn’t express himself properly. He loved them just as much, but he couldn’t put it into words.

Here is the early turn.

Switching from the indicative wondering of the first quatrain, the speaker suddenly gives readers a command: wonder not.

He claims that living like this, considering everything that happens to him from an outsider’s perspective, is simply a poet’s fate.
What does that mean? Don’t worry- he goes on to explain.

T.S. Eliot’s speaker faced a similar problem in “La Figlia che Piange”.