Life & Wisdom Quote by Lizette Woodworth Reese

Idleness is the knife in this line: it turns tears from proof of feeling into a kind of wasted motion. Reese isn’t denying grief so much as interrogating its performance. “I wonder” lands with cool, observant poise - not the heat of sobbing, but the mind watching the body and asking why it’s doing what it’s doing. The phrase suggests a speaker who has seen enough loss, or enough melodrama, to be suspicious of tears as default currency.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women’s sorrow was both demanded and dismissed: expected as a sign of sensitivity, then waved away as hysteria or weakness. Calling tears “idle” pushes back against that script. It implies an ethic of usefulness, a Protestant-tinged belief that emotion should earn its keep, that suffering should convert into action, endurance, art, or moral clarity. The subtext is almost impatient: if tears don’t change anything, what are they for?

The line also works because “idleness” is a moral word, not a descriptive one. Reese smuggles judgment into a single adjective, making the reader feel the tension between the legitimacy of pain and the pressure to be composed. It’s a quiet indictment of grief as spectacle and of the social rituals that surround it - the sanctioned weeping at funerals, the ornamental melancholy of certain romantic poses.

As a poet, Reese is also defending the economy of language. Tears are excessive; the line is spare. The wonder is less about emotion than about what we do with it when no one’s watching.