Sorrow (emotion)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Frontispiece for the 1638 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

L'Absinthe (1876) - Edgar Degas

Illustration: Laocoön and His Sons ("Clamores horrendos" detail), photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen.

The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins (1778-79) by Henry Fuseli

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Sorrow is an emotion, feeling, or sentiment of intense sadness, suggesting a degree of resignation.

Cult

Romanticism saw a cult of sorrow develop, reaching back to The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774, and extending through the nineteenth century with contributions like Tennyson's In Memoriam - 'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me/No casual mistress, but a wife' - up to W. B. Yeats in 1889, still 'of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming'.

Postponement

Julia Kristeva suggests that 'taming sorrow, not fleeing sadness at once but allowing it to settle for a while...is what one of the temporary and yet indispensable phases of analysis might be'.

Etymology

From Middle English sorow, sorwe, from Old English sorh, sorg, from Proto-Germanic *surgō (cf. West Frisian soarch, Dutch zorg, German Sorge, Danish sorg), from Proto-Indo-European *swergʰ- 'to watch over, worry' (cf. Old Irish serg 'sickness', Tocharian B sark 'id.', Lithuanian sirgti ‘to be sick’, Albanian dergjem (“I fall ill”), Sanskrit sū́rkṣati ‘he worries’ ).

In the arts

• Sorrow, lithograph by Vincent van Gogh (1882)
• Sorrow, Tears and Blood (1977) by Fela Kuti

See also

• Depression (mood)
• Unpleasant
• Grief
• Regret (emotion)
• Suffering
• Woe
• Misery
• Moan
• Woe
• Sorry
• Pang
• Melancholy
• Mourn
• Tears
• Alas