Tears, sighs, and hermits

I read this today in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages:

Where perfect love casts forth the jealous fear,

A diamond in thy diadem each tear;

And every sigh that rent thy suffering breast,

A wave of rapture on the shores of rest.

These lines, identifying each tear and sigh with something quite different (a diamond, a wave of rapture), reminded me of a quatrain found in Blake's "The Grey Monk" and "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne":

For a Tear is an intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

("For a Tear is an intellectual thing" is such a perfect line! Blake was a genius of the highest order.)

The idea of a Grey Monk already had me thinking about the Hermit card, and when I looked up and reread those Blake poems, I found that each also includes this stanza:

But vain the Sword and vain the Bow,

They never can work War's overthrow.

The Hermit's prayer and the Widow's tear

Alone can free the World from fear.

(In "The Grey Monk," this is immediately followed by the first stanza I cited above, which I think is poetically correct. In "I saw a Monk of Charlemagne," the line about the Almighty's bow is the final line of the poem, which is also poetically correct. Thus I link both versions, being unable to give my unqualified endorsement to either.)

Blake's reference to what "can free the World from fear" syncs with Whitney's "perfect love casts forth the jealous fear."

In "A dove from the fridge, a reaper angel, a white SUV, and An Account That Moooves," I dreamt of a Tarot card depicting a gray-robed angel with straight blond hair, holding a scythe. In the commentary on this in the post, I included images of two Rider-Waite cards: the Hermit, who wears a gray robe; and Justice, to whom straight blond hair is unique in that deck.

Justice is crowned and holds a sword. Combining this with the reaper angel on the dream-card, we get "a Scythe is the sword of an Angel King" -- differing from Blake's line by but a single phoneme.

We could also respell Blake's line as "a sai is the sword of an Angel King" -- meaning, presumably, the archangel Raphael.