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Love Quote by Anne Bronte

"Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe"

About this Quote

Exhaustion, not drama, is the engine of Anne Bronte's lament. "Oh, I am very weary" lands with the bluntness of someone past the stage of pleading to be understood. The startling move comes next: "Though tears no longer flow". In most sentimental writing, dry eyes signal recovery. Here they signal depletion. Bronte turns the body's failed response into evidence of how long grief has been grinding on: the speaker isn't healed; she's wrung out.

The line-by-line structure does quiet rhetorical work. "My eyes are tired of weeping" shifts sorrow into muscle memory, a repetitive labor that has simply worn out its tools. Then "My heart is sick of woe" gives grief a medical register: not romantic suffering but an illness that lingers, infects, and dulls. The repeated "My" tightens the poem's claustrophobia. This isn't tragedy observed from a distance; it's a self trapped in its own symptoms.

Context matters: Bronte wrote in a culture that prized feminine sensibility but punished female candor. She threads the needle by using the familiar vocabulary of Victorian melancholy while slipping in something more radical: the refusal of catharsis. There's no cleansing tear, no moral uplift, no tidy lesson. For a novelist attuned to the mechanics of coercion and endurance, weariness becomes its own critique. The subtext is survival under pressure: when sorrow stops being expressive and becomes infrastructural, the body doesn't perform grief; it hosts it.

Quote Details

TopicSadness
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Bronte, Anne. (2026, January 15). Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/oh-i-am-very-weary-though-tears-no-longer-flow-my-166978/

Chicago Style
Bronte, Anne. "Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/oh-i-am-very-weary-though-tears-no-longer-flow-my-166978/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/oh-i-am-very-weary-though-tears-no-longer-flow-my-166978/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow
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About the Author

Anne Bronte

Anne Bronte (January 17, 1820 - May 28, 1849) was a Novelist from United Kingdom.

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