"Striving to tell his woes, words would not come; For light cares speak, when mighty griefs are dumb"
About this Quote
Grief, Daniel suggests, doesn’t just overwhelm the heart; it sabotages language itself. The line turns a familiar complaint - “I can’t even talk about it” - into a theory of emotional scale: small troubles stay chatty, while catastrophe shuts down speech. That inversion is the point. We expect big feelings to produce big declarations, the stagey monologue of tragedy. Daniel gives us the opposite: the most “mighty” pain appears as silence, not rhetoric.
The craft is in the friction between “striving” and failure. The speaker is actively trying to narrate his suffering, reaching for a social script where confession earns relief or recognition. But “words would not come” makes that script collapse. The subtext is almost accusatory toward language: it’s a tool built for manageable problems, “light cares” that can be packaged into sentences and exchanged in conversation. When grief becomes existential - death, betrayal, irreparable loss - it stops being information to transmit and becomes an atmosphere to endure. Silence isn’t emptiness; it’s proportion.
As an Elizabethan poet, Daniel is also writing in a culture that prized eloquence and courtly display. That context sharpens the line’s quiet rebellion. Instead of showcasing verbal mastery, he stages its breakdown, implying that the deepest sincerity may arrive as inarticulacy. The couplet’s neat balance (“light” vs. “mighty,” “speak” vs. “dumb”) ironically delivers the very eloquence it claims grief cannot manage, capturing a paradox: poetry can describe speechlessness even when speech fails.
The craft is in the friction between “striving” and failure. The speaker is actively trying to narrate his suffering, reaching for a social script where confession earns relief or recognition. But “words would not come” makes that script collapse. The subtext is almost accusatory toward language: it’s a tool built for manageable problems, “light cares” that can be packaged into sentences and exchanged in conversation. When grief becomes existential - death, betrayal, irreparable loss - it stops being information to transmit and becomes an atmosphere to endure. Silence isn’t emptiness; it’s proportion.
As an Elizabethan poet, Daniel is also writing in a culture that prized eloquence and courtly display. That context sharpens the line’s quiet rebellion. Instead of showcasing verbal mastery, he stages its breakdown, implying that the deepest sincerity may arrive as inarticulacy. The couplet’s neat balance (“light” vs. “mighty,” “speak” vs. “dumb”) ironically delivers the very eloquence it claims grief cannot manage, capturing a paradox: poetry can describe speechlessness even when speech fails.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sadness |
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