Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe.

This quatrain is the opening of Anne Brontë’s poem “Weary,” a lyric of emotional exhaustion and grief. It belongs to the body of verse she wrote in the 1840s and later published under the Bell pseudonym in the Brontë sisters’ joint 1846 volume. The speaker describes a state beyond fresh tears—where crying has become physically and spiritually depleted—setting the tone for a poem that contrasts prolonged suffering with a yearning for rest and release. The lines reflect the Brontës’ broader poetic preoccupation with endurance, sorrow, and the limits of consolation, expressed here in a plain, direct idiom.

The speaker voices an exhaustion that goes beyond momentary sadness: tears have run out, yet suffering persists. The lines distinguish between outward expression (weeping) and inward condition (a heart “sick of woe”), suggesting a numb, depleted stage of grief in which emotion is no longer cathartic. The plain diction and repetitive structure (“tired,” “sick”) intensify the sense of weariness and emotional attrition. Read in the context of Brontë’s poetry more generally, the passage exemplifies her unsentimental clarity about pain—less romanticized anguish than a stark recognition of how prolonged sorrow can drain the body and spirit.