Life & Wisdom Quote by John Cleveland

Cleveland turns sorrow into a lawless ecology: tears that refuse to behave. “My tears will keep no channel, know no laws” yanks grief out of the tidy, moralized world where emotions are supposed to move in orderly “streams.” The line’s engine is control slipping its leash. Channels and laws imply a civil state; his body becomes a flooded country, and the speaker isn’t merely sad but politically and spiritually ungoverned.

The simile does the real work: “but like the waves, their cause, / run with disturbance.” Waves don’t need permission. They don’t even need a clear “cause” in the human sense; they are set in motion by forces that exceed individual will. Cleveland is writing in a mid-17th-century England where “disturbance” isn’t a neutral word: it carries the taste of civil unrest, the fear of things breaking formation. The poem borrows that public vocabulary to dignify private collapse. Misery becomes a kind of uprising.

Most devastating is the ending: “till they swallow me.” It’s not catharsis; it’s drowning. Early modern poets often stage tears as proof of sincerity or piety, but Cleveland’s tears are not edifying. They’re indifferent, elemental, capable of erasing the self. The subtext is almost accusatory: if grief has no channel and no law, then the speaker’s identity - and the social scripts meant to contain pain - are flimsy scaffolding against the tide.