Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

The line suggests that love’s full magnitude often becomes clear only when it is threatened or interrupted—especially by separation. In ordinary continuity, affection can feel familiar and unexamined; parting forces a reckoning with what has been taken for granted, revealing emotional dependence, attachment, and the value of shared life. The “agony” is not merely pain but a clarifying intensity: loss (or the prospect of it) strips away routine and self-deception, exposing how deeply one is bound to another. Eliot’s phrasing also implies a bittersweet paradox: love’s depth is most visible at the moment it is least secure, when presence turns into absence.