A TEAR AND A SMILE by Kahlil Gibran

An Analysis by Kervin John F. Agulto

About the Author

Kahlil Gibran (1893 – 1931) is a Lebanese-American writer, an essayist, novelist, and a

mystic poet. He wrote “The Prophet”—a collection of philosophical essays that went on to
become one of the bestselling books of the Twentieth Century. Much of Gibran’s work contains
themes of religion and Christianity, as well as spiritual love.

General Analysis

The poem revolves around love, happiness, and beauty. It talks about the inmost longing
of one soul in between the realms of rhapsody and desolation. Life, according to the poem, is an
endless cycle of happiness and sorrow and is full of longing.

The author used two metaphors in his literary text: tear and smile. Tear denotes sadness
while smile denotes euphoric spirit. The thing that moved me about this specific literary art is
author’s meaningful conveyance of implicit meaning behind every word he used. He entailed tear
as the purifier of the heart, that it allows us to understand life better. Conversely, he connoted
smile as the joy of one’s existence which made me think how powerful a smile can be—a beaming
hope that lights up our weary world. As life undergoes different phases, there is a greater force
that controls its mere existence—God—which the author described as the ocean of love and
beauty.

Personally, I derived a message that life is a beautiful gift from our Almighty Creator.
However, it must undergo brokenness and despair to create a more meaningful existence. Life is
like gold and trials serve as its touchstone. It is crushed, pressured, and melted to attest its purity.
Life is an oxymoron—a bittersweet reality. Thus, it is bound to face a thousand struggles, and only
then you’ll find its true beauty and purpose. In addition, happiness and love can co-exist with
sorrow and loss. It gives a better view of life, develops our empathy that allows us to have a
delicate emotional balance and for us to understand the world better.

Literary Devices & Symbolisms

Literary Device #1: Symbolisms

 Delving through the depths of the poem, the thing that caught my heart was the author’s
passion for meaningful connotation of words through symbolisms. Let me elaborate the idea
through breaking down some excerpts from the poem:
Flower

“…. with evening’s coming the flower folds her petals

And sleeps, embracing her longings.
At morning’s approach she opens her lips to meet
The sun’s kiss.

The life of a flower is longing and fulfilment

A tear and a smile…”

As I interpret the text, the author implicitly compared human to a flower, that for it to
bloom, it needs to undergo several phases. Just like human emotions, flowers are vulnerable but
are always meant to grow. In life, we always have that yearning to rise above our own undergoing,
just like how the flowers yearn for sunlight to rise from a bud to be a full-grown flower. The
process is not an easy feat; it takes days and nights of toils and struggles but the longing is always
there—to grow!

Clouds

“… the water of the sea become vapor and rise and come
Together and area cloud.

and the cloud floats above the hills an valleys

Until it meets the gentle breeze, the falls weeping
To the fields and joins with brooks and rivers to return to the sea, its home.

The life of clouds is a parting and meeting.

A tear and a smile…”

Clouds, as we can infer from the lines, is also a metaphor of humans. Wherein, like clouds,
we hold supreme emotions that we carry through our lives. One of those supreme emotions are
happiness and sorrow. We are like clouds that are absorbent, take as much as we can bear, and
release it all when we can bear no more. The poem also tells that in life, we meet people and
suddenly lose some. Life is a reality of people who come and go, and it allows us to dive into the
depths of our emotions, recognize its significance, and derive a purpose out of it. After clouds
released all its heaviness, it becomes light again and vanish from the atmosphere. Apparently, that
is life: we live with a purpose, and once it is fulfilled, we go back to where we really belong—to
God!

Literary Device #2: Metaphor

 Love and Beauty

“… To the ocean of love and beauty----to God.”

The author described God as the “ocean of love and beauty.” As you can see in 10 th and 12th
stanzas, there is an inherent connection between the thoughts that every stanza holds. The
author started to formulate a plot of how the cloud is formed; it then later falls, weeping through
the fields and becomes water again. The question is: where do all the waters go after they travel
the surface? To the ocean. It talks about the cycle of life: we begin from God and we return to God
—the ocean of beauty and love.

Literary Device #3: Refrain

“… I would that my life a tear and a smile…”

“… The life of a flower is longing and fulfilment.

a tear and a smile…”

“… The life of clouds is a parting and meeting.

A tear and a smile…”

In Poetry, refrain is a repeated word, line, or group of lines that appears at the end of a
stanza. It is a poetic device that uses repetition to place emphasis on a set of words or an idea
within a poem (MasterClass, 2021). The author made use of repetitive line to ensure maximum
retention and powerful conveyance of the message. It was intentionally repeated in the stanzas to
instill the meaning wherein the mood of the reader will reflect the author’s emotion in the poem.
The line suggests an intense tone: happiness and sorrow, and it is what the author wants the
readers to feel. I think the author made a good style of inculcating the specific emotion of the
literary piece.

Literary Device #4: Idiomatic Expressions

“… and so does the spirit become separated from

The greater spirit to move in in the world of matter
And pass as a cloud over the mountains of sorrow
And plains of joy to meet the breeze of death
And return whence it came…”

The thing that I love most about Kahlil Gibran is his artistry. He can play well with pool of
words and turn them into a phrase filled with overwhelming emotions. Here are few of the
expressions he used in the poem:

Mountains of sorrow: an extreme sadness or grief; associated with loss of someone or something
you really love.
Plains of joy: an intense euphoric feeling.
Breeze of death: it’s like greeting death as an old friend: gently and willingly.

You can notice the association of the three idiomatic expressions. It is the cycle of life: we
seek for our ultimate goal which is to find happiness. Along the way, we encounter tempest
storms in our lives that shape us. We got to experience life’s verity on our own perspective. We
have been through a lot of struggles—we experienced to love and to be loved. We exist to live,
and that’s when we fulfill our own purpose in the complexity and bewilderment of life.

I have two interpretations about that particular stanza: the first is all about our mere
existence, and the second is all about the parting of two lovers.

Interpretation #1: we were brought forth from our mother’s womb; our mere existence is a
covenant of life—bound for death.

Interpretation #2: we meet a specific person in our life whom we share our soul with, but life is a
series of parting and meeting. People come and go—we become happy and sad in the process. We
live and meet people and fulfill our purpose. After that, we will have our last goodbye and greet
death to face the afterlife.

Structural Analysis

The poem is in free verse. It deviated from the usual traditional way which is strictly
adhering to fixed meters, rhyme scheme, stanzas, and lines. The poem has inconsistent lines per
stanza that is evidently seen in the entire literary piece. More so, the author incorporated various
types of stanzas, specically: monostich (one-line stanza), couplet (two-line stanza), quatrain
(four-line stanza), and quintet (five-line stanza) and were randomly placed all throughout the
poem.

Conclusion

All in all, the poem exuded wide variety of techniques. The provoking emotion of the
literary piece was unveiled with grace and elegance that was subtly executed through various
literary techniques. The poem tells us something about balance. It insinuates that we must break
for us to rebuild ourselves again. Moreover, brokenness is God’s way of rebuilding us, because in
brokenness, beauty is known. One must find the balance between happiness and sorrow as he
continually seeks for a meaningful life. Evidently, life is short, so we should make the most out of
it.
Submitted to:
Lyries K’Zandra G. Angeles
Subject Instructor