"Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps"

Paradoxes of emotion reside at the heart of William Blake’s words, revealing the fluid and unpredictable nature of human feeling. When sorrow becomes excessive, it threatens to overflow the boundaries of grief, transforming pain into laughter that may seem maniacal or absurd. Such laughter is not rooted in happiness, but rather in the extremity of suffering, where ordinary emotional responses collapse. Faced with overwhelming sorrow, people sometimes find themselves overcome by a kind of hysterical amusement, a release that serves as both a defense and an escape, making the unbearable moment manageable for a time. This laughter, then, is not joyous, but a symptom of emotional excess, a signal that the heart has been pushed too far, beyond the limit of conventional mourning.

Conversely, excessive joy has the strange power to stir tears. When happiness becomes overwhelming, it too spills over in ways we do not anticipate. Tears flow freely in moments of great joy because the intensity of feeling cannot be contained; it demands a physical outlet. Parents weep at the birth of a child, lovers at reunions, artists at the culmination of their work. In such moments, joy and grief touch each other, each borrowing from the other’s language to express what lies beyond words. The boundaries between weeping and laughter blur, pointing toward a deep truth about the human experience: emotions, when carried to their extreme, transform into their apparent opposites.

Blake’s insight lies in his recognition that the poles of our emotional world are not fixed, but circular, one extreme circles into the other. This vision reflects a spiritual as well as psychological reality within his poetry, where opposites complement and complete each other. Ultimately, Blake suggests that human feeling is a continuum, and it is in the extremity of experience that we most clearly see how closely interwoven are laughter and weeping, sorrow and joy.