Sometimes our greatest comfort. Often our darkest fear that we are about to be overwhelmed by sudden and uncontrollable feelings.

From misting of the eyes, through soft drizzles on cheek to cascades that would put Niagara falls to shame the event of tears comes in all shapes and sizes. There is something primordial in their arrival. We may be the only animal to actually cry and scientists in their wish to explain everything cite the simultaneous release of endorphins to help relieve the emotional stress, the physical pain, as vital to restore the sense of calm and well-being. But not everything can be explained and pigeon-holed with certainty.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all. As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.

From Owen and Dickenson to Wheatly and Hopkins our surrender to tears may not be far away.

1 - Poems to Make You Cry - An Introduction

2 - Because I Liked You by A E Housman

3 - Sonnet 147 by William Shakespeare

4 - A Broken Appointment by Thomas Hardy

5 - So We'll Go No More a Roving by Lord Byron

6 - When You Are Old by W B Yeats

7 - Sonnet 90 - Then Hate Me When Thou Wilt; If Ever, Now by William Shakespeare

8 - I Shall Not Care by Sara Teasdale

9 - Goodbye by Alun Lewis

10 - The Wind's Lament by John Morris-Jones

11 - Sad-Eyed and Soft and Grey by William Morris

12 - The Sad Shepherd's Passion of Love by George Peele

13 - How Sweet I Roam'd From Field to Field by William Blake

14 - When I Have Fears by John Keats

15 - The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold

16 - We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar

17 - I Am by John Clare

18 - Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

19 - Ode XIV - To Solitude by Joseph Warton

20 - Solitude by Harold Munro

21 - Disappointment by Mary E Tucker

22 - A Thought For a Lonely Death Bed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

23 - Alone by Edgar Allan Poe

24 - Piano by D H Lawrence

25 - Infelix by Adah Isaacs Menken

26 - Sonnet 66. Tired With All These, For Restful Death by William Shakespeare

27 - Life's Tragedy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

28 - No Worse There is None. Pitched Past, Pitch of Grief by Gerard Manley Hopkins

29 - Ardelia To Melancholy by Anne Kingsmill-Finch

30 - Melancholia by Robert Seymour Bridges

31 - The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

32 - The Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood

33 - Enslaved Poem by Claude McKay

34 - The Hunters of Men by John Greenleaf Whittier

35 - The Lynching by Claude McKay

36 - Poems on the Slave Trade. Sonnet VI by Robert Southey

37 - The Slave's Complaint by George Moses Horton

38 - The Slave Mother by Frances E W Harper

39 - The Slave's Singing at Midnight by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

40 - For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon

41 - Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

42 - On Somme by Ivor Gurney

43 - In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

44 - I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger

45 - Fallen by Alice Corbin

46 - In Memoriam (Easter 1915) by Edward Thomas

47 - Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wildred Owen

48 - My Boy Jack by Rudyard Kipling

49 - Tears Ere Thy Death by Khansa

50 - Bereavement In Their Death To Feel by Emily Dickinson

51 - If Grief For Grief Can Touch These by Emily Bronte

52 - Goodbye by Richard Aldington

53 - Goodbye In Fear Goodbye In Sorrow by Christina Rossetti

54 - A Quoi Bon Dire by Charlotte Mew

55 - To One in Grief by Katharine Tynan

56 - I Measure Every Grief by Emily Dickinson

57 - Tears Idle Tears from The Princess by Alfred Lord Tennyson

58 - Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe

59 - Sir Patrick Spens by Anonymous

60 - John Barleycorn, A Ballad by Robert Burns

61 - A Lament by Katharine Tynan

62 - Remember by Christina Rossetti

63 - Epitaph Upon a Child That Died by Robert Herrick

64 - To a Lady and Her Children on the Death of Her Son and Their Brother by Phyllis Wheatley

65 - On the Death of a Child by Edward Silvera

66 - On My First Son by Ben Jonson

67 - The Death of the First Born by Paul Laurence Dunbar

68 - In Memoriam. Alphonse Campbell Fordham by Mary Weston Fordham