Tears

We're not talking about a few drops here. We're talking about a huge, raging flood of tears. That's why this image is so important. It makes the speaker's sadness into a real, physical thing. The tears in this poem are just as dramatic and major as the speaker's feeling. His grief is huge, and so the world is covered in tears. We're way beyond Kleenex.

• Line 12: Have you ever felt so depressed that the whole world seemed sad? That's exactly where our speaker is. He sees tears that "drip all over" that blur his vision, and cloud the shapes of things in Dream-Land. This is a weird place, so maybe the world is really crying, but we think it's more likely that he's seeing dewdrops or rain, and turning them into tears because that's all he can think about.