Vale of Tears
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VALE OF TEARS The Bible conveys such a strong sense of lachrymae rerum that St. Jerome was able to say that “the first man ... was cast down from paradise into this vale of tears” (NPNF 6.26). The phrase “vale of tears,” which is ubiquitous in English literature, derives from the LXX translation of Ps. 84:5-6, where the Hebrew phrase “valley of Baca” was confused with Heb. bakah, “weeping,” and rendered “valley of weeping,” thus entering into Western tradition through the Vg translation, “in valle lacrymarum” (Ps. 83:7). The idea of earthly existence as a vale of tears owes also to the biblical promise that God’s final salvation will include the wiping away of all tears (Isa. 25:8; Rev. 7:17; 21:4). This same promise is reflected in the beatitude, “Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh” (Luke 6:21; cf. Matt. 5:4). St. Augustine explicitly ties the beatitude to Jesus’ weeping (NPNF 3.427), and other commentators explain the tears of the Man of Sorrows as a sign of his condescension to humanity (St. John Chrysostom [NPNF 14.232, 242]; St. Cyril [FC 47.121, 123]; St. Athanasius [FC 19.476-78]; St. Hilary of Poitiers [FC 23.442-45]; Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 2.295). Christ’s tears are the basis for Vaughan’s “Jesus weeping (1 and 2)” and are alluded to in Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem and in Joyce’s Ulysses.
Weeping in the Scriptures is frequently the external manifestation of penitence (Ezra 10:1; Neh. 1:4; Joel 2:12-17; Matt. 26:75; Luke 23:28) and is regarded as a prime evidence of contrition by many exegetes. As type of the Church, St. Peter, according to St. Gregory (Moralia in Iob, 3.119), “strengthened the root of faith which was ... withering away, by watering it with his tears.” The “voice of weeping and lament” which characterizes the Church in an age of of persecution is the theme of a hymn by the Venerable Bede, but it is to the time when “every tear is wiped away” that the “little flock and blest” ought to turn its expectation (Hymnum Canentes Martyrum, trans. J. M. Neale). The tears of repentance are alluded to in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale (Canterbury Tales,10.993-94) and in The Tale of Melibee, though in the latter Prudence commends the patience of Job in distinguishing for the weeper “attempree weeping” from “outrageous weeping.” Milton ends bk. 10 of his Paradise Lost with Adam and Eve shedding tears of contrition; when Michael reveals the history of humanity in the following book, they realize that “the world erelong a world of tears must weep” (11.627), but when they leave Eden their realization of the felix culpa wipes away their “natural tears” (12.645; cf. Rev. 7:17; 21:4). Herbert’s “Altar” is “Made of a heart and cemented with tears” (2) and, after sin has stained the marble of the “Church-floore,” “all is cleansed when the marble weeps” (15). Drowning in tears is linked to the Flood by Milton (PL 11.754-58) and by Donne (“Holy Sonnet 5”; cf. Lam. 2:19), who elsewhere makes tears a type of baptism (Sermons, 9.290-91). Tears are regarded as God-sends by Cowper in “To a Protestant Lady” (47-50) and by Blake in “The Grey Monk,” where they are “intellectual” (i.e., imaginative) things. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “Tears” is effectively a meditation on the beatitude, “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” For Hopkins, tears are a “melting,” a “madrigal” (Wreck of the Deutschland, st. 18); for Auden, a “healing fountain” in the “deserts of the heart” (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”). Dew is an emblem for tears in Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew” and in Herrick’s “To Primroses filled with Morning-dew,” a poem whose “lecture” confirms the perception that “we came crying hither” (King Lear, 4.6.175). The tears in “Jesus weeping [1],” and elsewhere in Vaughan, are compared to “soul-quickning rain” (10) and “live dew” (14). In the Cowper poem, tears find an analogue in the dew on Gideon’s fleece (Judg. 6:36-40). The bottle of tears connected with the penance of Spenser’s Mirabella (Faerie Queene, 6.8.24) and mentioned in Herbert’s “Praise [III]” and Vaughan’s “The seed growing secretly” is an image doubly related to Ps. 56:8 and the story of Ishmael (Gen. 21:14-19). The impenitent Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick can muster only a single tear, but even it is redeemed by an “allusive comparison” to the widow’s mite of Mark 12:41-44 (see H. T. Walter, Moby Dick and Calvinism [1977], 148).
Perhaps the most compelling of OT treatments of tears is Ps. 137, which begins “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” In the ensuing verses, the Israelites’ refusal to compromise their faith by singing songs of mirth is a witness to the fact that the “very praise of the Psalms is mourning” (Paschasius of Dumium [FC 62.159]). Versions of this psalm were written not only by authors such as the Countess of Pembroke, Campion, Bacon, Crashaw, Carew, and Denham, but also by Byron, Swinburne, and C. Rossetti. Burns puts it to humorous use in “The Ordination,” and T. S. Eliot refers to it ironically in The Waste Land (182), where tears become part of the poem’s water imagery.
The principal focus of “the literature of tears,” as Martz terms a subgenre of Counter-Reformation poetry (The Poetry of Meditation [1962], 199-203), is Mary Magdalene, identified by medieval and some Renaissance commentators on three occasions in the Bible as weeping (Luke 7:38; John 11:33; 20:11): from the English pronunciation of her name we have the word maudlin. The fullest elaboration on the weeping Mary, who was often identified with the sister of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10:42; John 12:3), is Crashaw’s “The Weeper,” a baroque poem whose biblical and exegetical roots have been established by Manning in “The Meaning of ‘The Weeper’“ (ELH 22 [1955], 34-47). Mary Magdalene also figures in medieval mystery plays, such as the Cornwall, Towneley, Chester, York, and Digby cycles. Chaucer, who knew some of these plays and the pseudo-Origen De Maria Magdalena, may be alluding to the biblical character ironically when he describes the Wife of Bath’s sorrow for her fourth husband (CT 3.587-92; see ChauR 12 [1977], 218-33). Among modern examples of the literature of tears the “Lachrimae” sequence from Geoffrey Hill’s Tenebrae (1978) is noteworthy.
See also man of sorrows; mary magdalene; rachel; ramah; rivers of babylon.
Ronald B. Bond
Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans.
