Tears
Salt water, honestly earned: how to write crying without drowning the poem.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about tears: restraint, salt and honest grief, with craft techniques, common mistakes and writing prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Tears are the body's most public secret. They arrive uninvited, at funerals and weddings, in cars and supermarket aisles, and they never quite mean one thing: grief, relief, laughter, rage and chopped onions all use the same salt water. A tear poem is really a poem about what leaks when composure fails, and its subject is as much the fight not to cry as the crying itself.
Science distinguishes reflex tears from emotional ones, as if feeling changes their very chemistry, and poetry has always known the difference. The dabbed eye at a convenient moment is one thing; the ugly, heaving, unphotogenic cry is another, and readers can tell which one a poem has actually witnessed.
Why poets return to it
Poets write tears because crying is where language gives up, and poems are built on that frontier. But the theme carries poetry's oldest risk: sentimentality. A poem that weeps over itself leaves the reader dry, so tears force a poet to master restraint, which is why the theme is such a good teacher. On Writory's score sheet, emotion is one of five judging criteria, and the entries that score highest for it are usually the ones that hold their tears the longest.
Where it comes from
Virgil named the tears of things, lacrimae rerum, twenty centuries ago: the sadness soaked into the world itself. Tennyson, in 1847, wrote Tears, Idle Tears, confessing he did not know what his tears meant, which remains the most honest sentence in the theme. Victorians kept lachrymatories, small bottles said to store the tears of mourning, an image poets still borrow. And the elegy, poetry's formal machinery of grief from ancient Greece to the present, has always been the tear's official residence, even when the finest elegies keep their eyes conspicuously dry.
The elements that carry it
- Salt: the taste on the lip, the sea, sweat, preservation, one crystal binding tears to the body's other waters.
- The pre-cry signals: the sting, the swimming vision, the throat's knot, often stronger on the page than the tears themselves.
- Handkerchiefs, tissues and sleeves, and the person who offers them.
- Rain and condensation, the weather's crying, useful and dangerously overused.
- Onions and other alibis: the excuses people give for crying in kitchens.
Techniques that work
- Write the almost-cry. The held tear, the blink, the steadied voice put the reader inside the struggle; open weeping releases the tension you built.
- Give the tears an alibi and let the reader see through it: the speaker blames the onions, and the poem quietly disagrees.
- Displace with control: if the weather must cry, let it do so once, briefly, and keep the speaker suspiciously composed.
- Use gesture instead of announcement: who wipes whose face, who looks away, who keeps stirring the pot.
- Cut every sad, grief and sorrow from the draft, then check whether the images alone still tighten the reader's throat. If not, the problem was never vocabulary.
Mistakes to avoid
- Announcing emotion: tears of sorrow streaming down. The reader is told what to feel and promptly refuses.
- Rain equals tears. The oldest displacement in the book needs a fresh angle or a long rest.
- Sentimental escalation, each stanza wetter than the last. Restraint, not volume, is what breaks readers.
- Making crying beautiful. Real crying is blotchy, noisy and inconvenient; its unloveliness is what convinces.
An exercise
Write about the last time you cried, without using cry, tears, weep, sad or any of their relatives. Only the body's signals and other people's reactions are allowed.
A challenge
Write two versions of the same funeral scene: one in which the speaker cries and one in which they cannot. Show both to a reader and ask which one moved them; the answer is usually instructive.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about someone crying in a parked car before going inside to be fine.
Before you submit
- No tears are announced with abstractions like sorrow or heartbreak.
- The physical pre-cry signals appear before, or instead of, the tears.
- Weather imagery, if present, does something the tradition has not already done a thousand times.
- At least one gesture from another person locates the crying in a social world.
- The final image trusts the reader; it does not wring the last drop.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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