Sorrow (emotion)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sorrow is an emotion, feeling, or sentiment of intense sadness, suggesting a degree of resignation.
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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