Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.

Cowper’s line intensifies the commonplace comparison between separation and death by arguing that absence can feel even more annihilating than mortality itself. Death, however terrible, is final and therefore ends expectation; absence, by contrast, keeps desire and anticipation alive, so that hope repeatedly renews the pain. The paradox “frustrates hope severer than despair” suggests that despair is a settled condition, while hope is an active force that can be thwarted again and again. The quotation captures an eighteenth-century sensibility in which emotional attachment is treated as a profound moral and psychological reality, and it anticipates later Romantic explorations of longing, distance, and the torment of deferred reunion.