Most poems about crying treat tears as a symptom of sorrow. Anna M. Johnson's "Tears" does something more surprising: it insists that certain tears are a solution. Her speaker opens by denying that her weeping is trivial, and spends the rest of the poem explaining what it actually is, a process of purification that washes away the pain of living.
The first stanza sets up a contrast through a single simile. Idle tears, the poem says, "dance into my eyes / As sudden raindrops do / From out the darkened skies." The verb "dance" is a curious choice. It makes the shallow kind of crying feel light, almost playful, a passing shower that arrives without warning and means nothing. By describing what her tears are not, the speaker defines them against this weather-like randomness. The phrase "no idle tears" is a bold opening for another reason too: it reads like a reply to an argument we haven't heard, as though someone has dismissed her crying and she is correcting them.
The second stanza shifts from the surface to the depths. Where the first stanza's raindrops fall *from* the sky into the eyes, these tears "have soaked through / All my being in their flow." The imagery moves from weather to saturation, from a passing splash to something that permeates the whole person. The word "soaked" suggests slow, thorough absorption, and "flow" implies a steady current instead of scattered drops. This is crying as a continuous event rather than a flicker of feeling.
The key word here is "cleansing." The tears have "cleansing power," and the poem's final claim is that they drown "every sentient Earthly woe / That would my soul devour." The language of that line is worth lingering over. Woe is called "sentient," as though suffering were a living creature with awareness and appetite, and the verb "devour" confirms the picture: grief is a predator that wants to consume the soul. Against it, the tears act like a flood. The metaphor is neatly turned, because water, which drowns things, is here used to drown the thing that would otherwise destroy her. Tears defeat sorrow with sorrow's own material. The capital E on "Earthly" quietly adds a spiritual dimension, setting worldly suffering against the soul that it threatens.
The poem's construction supports this movement from lightness to depth. The first stanza is a tidy quatrain with an ABCB rhyme scheme ("eyes" and "skies" chiming together), its short lines moving at an easy, lilting pace that matches the "dancing" it describes. The second stanza breaks the pattern. It runs to five lines, the line lengths loosen, and the rhymes become less predictable: "woe" and "flow" pair up, then "devour" and "power" echo each other across the stanza, before the final line, "is drowned by them and disappears," closes on a sound that rhymes with "tears," the poem's own title and opening word. That last echo gives a sense of circling back, of a thought completed. The line also slides away quietly: the verb "disappears" is soft and almost weightless, so the poem ends not with a crash but with the sensation of burden lifting.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of a familiar assumption. We are used to hearing that tears signal weakness or loss, and that comfort lies in stopping them. Johnson's speaker reverses this: the weeping is the healing, and the real danger would be to hold it back. The poem is short and its vocabulary plain, yet it makes a genuine claim about emotional release, that some pain can only leave the body by flowing out of it. A reader who has ever felt better after a good cry will recognise the truth in that, and will probably appreciate how the poem dignifies the experience rather than apologising for it.