Georgia Douglas Johnson, an African American poet and playwright, made her Washington, D.C. home a gathering place for Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. Yet her own early verse often turned inward, away from public calls for racial uplift and toward the private weather of the heart. “Tears and Kisses,” from her 1918 collection The Heart of a Woman, is one of her smallest lyrics. It names two kinds of tears and two kinds of kisses, using those paired images to suggest that the deepest parts of love and grief cannot be contained by the body.
The first couplet begins with tears that seem almost gentle: “sweet, refreshing like dewdrops that rise.” These tears have a cleansing quality; they are small, clear, and upward-moving, like moisture returning to the air. But the next line immediately measures a different sorrow: “There are tears far too deep for the lakes of the eyes.” Johnson turns the eye from a source of dewdrops into a lake, and then insists that even that image is not enough. Dewdrop tears can rise and vanish; deeper tears exceed the body’s capacity. This is not fleeting sadness but grief too large for the body’s small basin.
The poem then makes the same move with affection. “There are kisses like thistledown, fitfully sped,” she writes, choosing airy, feathery language. Thistledown drifts without direction, and “fitfully” suggests an impulsive, scattered tenderness that has no lasting hold. Against this, Johnson places “kisses that live in the hearts of the dead.” The paradox is quiet but startling: hearts associated with death are described as containers for living kisses. Love, in other words, does not end at the body’s limit; it persists in memory, in mourning, in whatever survives after the beloved is gone. The hushing consonants in “hearts” and “dead” slow the line, while “live” gives it a hidden pulse.
The poem’s construction reinforces its meaning. It is written in two couplets with a simple, chiming rhyme scheme—“rise” and “eyes,” “sped” and “dead.” The repeated opening “There are” works like a gentle wave, setting up each contrast in exactly the same syntactical pattern. The rhythm is not rigidly regular, but it has a balance that lets the paired images speak against each other. Words such as “dewdrops,” “thistledown,” “lakes,” and “dead” form a scale from the evaporating to the eternal. The poem’s brevity is essential: it offers no narrative, only a set of distinctions that leave the reader at the edge of what language can express.
What makes “Tears and Kisses” significant is how much emotional range Johnson compresses into four lines. At a moment when African American poetry was often expected to address racial uplift or public struggle, Johnson insisted that the inner life—the texture of a woman’s tears, the afterlife of a kiss—also deserved lyric attention. The poem does not sentimentalize love; it separates the passing from the permanent. Its final image, a living kiss inside a dead heart, holds both grief and continuity at once. That tension gives the poem its staying power: it honors what evaporates and what remains.