The speaker describes the departed as his “heart’s best treasure” (Line 12). The speaker’s heart thus symbolizes the mourner’s central conflict. Confronting the death of loved ones, we are caught between rationalization and emotional pull.

The intellect confirms for the speaker the cold reality of death, through images like the “silent Tomb” (Line 3) and through the timekeeping calculus that makes it certain “[t]hat neither present time, nor years unborn” (Line 13) will reunite him with those who have gone. The intellect is also the seat of his self-imprisoning grief: It is his “thought” (Line 9) that reminds him that he should not feel joy and should instead forever mourn. 

The heart, on the other hand, consoles the speaker—though its influence is as yet too small to withstand the power of the intellect. The heart allows the speaker a moment of reprieve—the second of joy he experiences—which reconnects him with the world that he is still a part of. The heart also inserts hints at the rewards of the Christian afterlife, describing the face of the dead as “heavenly” (Line 14). 

The speaker for now feels torn between these forces. But the poem’s last line, with its reference to heaven, implies the possibility of comfort.