“For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of the martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.”
The Gray Monk, st. 8
1800s, Poems from the Pickering Manuscript (c. 1805)
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William Blake 249
English Romantic poet and artist 1757–1827Related quotes

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), To Cowper (1842)
Context: p>All for myself the sigh would swell,
The tear of anguish start;
I little knew what wilder woe
Had filled the Poet's heart.I did not know the nights of gloom,
The days of misery;
The long, long years of dark despair,
That crushed and tortured thee.</p

Stanza 87, lines 5–8 (as translated by William Julius Mickle)-->
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto IV

“A man without money is a bow without an arrow.”
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, epigram for Chapter 18 (p. 180)
Ancient Shores (1996)

The Century Vol. 44, Issue 4 (August 1892)
Tears (1892)
“The heart bowed down by weight of woe
To weakest hope will cling.”
The Bohemian Girl (1843), set to music by Michael William Balfe.