The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

Lowell’s line expresses a familiar Romantic and Victorian consolation: emotional pain, however sharp, is not permanent. The “heart” stands for the inner life—memory, feeling, and attachment—while “sorrow and ache” suggest both grief and the lingering physicality of heartbreak. The verb “forgets” implies not a betrayal of the past but the mind’s gradual accommodation to loss: time and renewed experience soften what once felt unendurable. Read this way, the sentence offers a quiet faith in resilience and in the restorative powers of time, habit, and new affections, even when no explicit remedy is named.