To die and part is a less evil; but to part and live, there, there is the torment.

The line contrasts two kinds of loss: death, which ends suffering, and separation while still alive, which prolongs it. The speaker argues that dying and being parted is “less evil” because it closes the story; but to be forced to live on after parting is “torment,” since memory, longing, and uncertainty continue to work on the survivor. The repetition (“there, there”) heightens the emotional emphasis, as if the speaker can barely articulate where the real pain lies. In sentiment it belongs to a long tradition of tragic and romantic literature that treats absence as a living wound—grief not as a single event, but as an ongoing condition.