Abstract

This study aims to elucidate the rhetoric of tears as a stylistic and aesthetic phenomenon in the elegies of Al-Khansā, by analyzing the strategies of artistic formation of the weeping image and tracing the linguistic transformations in representing grief and loss. The study adopts a descriptive-analytical approach blending structural stylistics and textual linguistics, pausing at the thresholds of signification within the tears system which transforms from a mere biological secretion into an effective cultural and rhetorical sign. The findings reveal that Al-Khansā established a distinctive poetics of tears, shaping them into a multi-level suggestive system capable of evoking mythological and anthropological structures that furnish the elegiac scene. The study also demonstrates the linguistic shift from direct description to metaphorical and figural formation, where tears become a mirror for the mourning self and a bridge between the sensory and metaphysical worlds.