Confused Tears

Taking stanza two of Andrew Marvell’s “Mourning” as its focus, this essay argues that, within the poem’s multiple and intermingled readings of the mourner’s weeping, her tears fall in and out of figuration, as countervailing hydrologies of grace and carnality exploit their state changes between charged image and mere water. Against the speaker’s conclusion that the meaning of women’s tears can be supposed but is finally unknowable, the poem proposes a masturbatory heresy of self-sufficiency and multiplicity.