At the end of “Remembrance,” the speaker asks how, once “drinking deep” of the most profound grief, “that divinest anguish,” she “could seek the empty world again.” This question, and the image of “drinking deep,” works to develop the earlier images of water in the poem, which appeared in the descriptions of the “wave” of time and “tide” of the world.
But this image of “drinking deep” also works as a subtle allusion to the moment in the Bible, when, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus contemplates his crucifixion and asks God to “remove this cup from me.” In this moment, Jesus compares his coming crucifixion and suffering to a cup from which he will have to drink and asks if it is possible for God to take the cup away from him, so he won’t have to undergo this suffering.
In the poem, then, the image of “drinking deep” takes on a larger meaning, as does the phrase “divinest anguish.” The poem implicitly compares the speaker’s grief and suffering with the sacred suffering described within the Bible, when, according to the scripture, Jesus too suffers out of love and so leaves the earthly world. So too, for the speaker, in the face of this “divinest anguish,” the world becomes “empty.” Through this allusion, the poem suggests that true love between people, and the grief that people experience in losing someone they love, is not so different from divine love, and divine suffering.