The sense that sorrow and pathos are woven into existence itself..
“The tears of things” — the sorrow and pathos inherent in existence. From the Aeneid, where Aeneas, moved by a mural of the Trojan dead, says “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.”
A metaphysical, poetic claim about the world's inherent sorrow — the sorrow in things themselves — rather than a personal mood (melancholy), a world-weariness (Weltschmerz), or a longing for an absent beloved (saudade). A close cousin of Japanese mono no aware (the pathos of transience), though the two are not identical. Seamus Heaney rendered it “There are tears at the heart of things.”
lacrimae “tears” + rerum “of things” = “tears of things.”
lacrimae (nominative plural of lacrima “tear”) + rerum (genitive plural of res “thing”).
From Virgil's Aeneid I.462 (c. 29–19 BC). It remains a fixed literary allusion, recently echoed in Pope Francis's Fratelli tutti (2020) and Richard Rohr's The Tears of Things (2025); no semantic shift.
The genitive rerum is famously ambiguous, and the dispute is the phrase's defining feature: objective (“tears for things” — sorrow at the sufferings depicted) vs. subjective (“things' own tears” — the world itself weeps). Scholars argue the indeterminacy is intentional; English translations are forced to choose what the Latin leaves open. It is also often used out of its consolatory original context.