A noun - “The world, or mortal or earthly life: this vale of tears”. (Dictionary.com word of the day 9/10/20.)
“How is vale used? All he really wanted to do in company was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it, to enrich and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy.”
Further, “As Keats witnessed more and more suffering—his brother Tom’s death; the infectious illnesses sweeping London—he connected his aesthetic vision to lived experience, and wrote in a letter that life is “a vale of soul-making: Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” (Meghan O’Rourke, “Americans Have To Accept Uncertainty,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2020.)
