With what a deep devotedness of woe I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain, And memory, like a drop that, night and day, Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!

The speaker describes grief as a self-renewing, almost ritual devotion: absence is mourned “o’er and o’er,” and the mind’s return to the beloved becomes a torment rather than comfort. The lines trace a psychological progression—thought fixates, fixation becomes pain, and memory turns into a physical force. The simile of the “drop” falling “night and day” evokes water’s slow erosion of stone, suggesting that sorrow need not be violent to be destructive; its power lies in persistence. The passage captures Romantic-era sensibility in which emotion is both exalted and consuming, and it dramatizes how remembrance can hollow the heart through continual repetition.