The speaker summons past griefs—lost friendships, dead loved ones, wasted time—and wallows in their accumulated sorrow, but is restored to peace when he remembers his friend.
The first 12 lines are a deliberate, sustained descent into melancholy. Each couplet or tercet deepens the inventory of loss: lost things, dead friends, wasted time, old griefs restaged. The parallelism ('I sigh...', 'Then can I drown...', 'And weep...', 'And moan...', 'Then can I grieve...') creates a ritualistic incantation. Repetition is not mere sadness but a formal working-through: the speaker testifies to accumulated hurt, refusing to minimize or skip past it. This honesty—this refusal to fake recovery—paradoxically prepares the ground for genuine healing.
The final couplet offers 'restoration' rather than denial: 'All losses are restored, and sorrows end.' Note that it does not say the past suffering disappears or that dead friends return. Instead, friendship 'restores' the losses—transforms their meaning. To restore is to rebuild, refresh, or legitimize anew. The beloved's presence does not undo grief but integrates it, making sorrow no longer the speaker's defining condition. This is emotionally more mature than denial: acknowledging that loss remains real while discovering that presence can coexist with, and ultimately outweigh, absence.
You're having a rough day and let yourself go down a spiral: thinking about friendships that faded, opportunities you missed, people who died, time you wasted on bad relationships. The weight of it all is crushing. But then you catch up with someone who truly matters to you, and somehow all those past hurts feel less final, less defining. Their presence doesn't erase the loss but makes it bearable.