Pathos: What It Is, and How Writers Evoke It

Pathos is one of the emotions writers most frequently evoke in their work. The noun pathos comes from ancient Greek and from the verb πάσχειν, or pas-thein, which means “to suffer.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines pathos as, “A quality which evokes pity, sadness, or tenderness…”

To me, pathos is a personal suffering, a solitary emotion, which is what makes it so poignant. Paradoxically, it is that individual, interior quality of pathos that allows us to empathize with it, since we’ve all experienced moments of pathos.

Unlike other emotions, such as love, hate, anger, outrage, friendship, etc., pathos only requires one person to experience its story. Because it mostly involves the fate of an individual, pathos might be the easiest emotion to invoke, so it’s a good place to start for a beginning writer.

One of the most classic examples of pathos for me is this poem by the great haiku writer, Hattori Ransetsu (1654–1707).

Hattori Ransetsu

Here is the haiku:

The childless woman,

How tender she is

To the dolls!

translated by R.H. Blyth

In this poem Ransetsu tells the story of one person’s life in fewer than twenty syllables. The woman, who is probably a shopkeeper, is arranging dolls, stroking their hair, neatening their clothes. Her tenderness toward them shows the reader the love she would have given her children, if she had them. This one scene, which the poet depicts with a few quick brushstrokes, gives us an entire narrative, an entire life. This is not a woman who has voluntarily chosen to forego having children. The pathos comes from the sense of loss, the absence of the life that this woman would have enjoyed as a mother, and the poignancy of her showing that love to a lifeless doll.

Even though pathos does not require many characters to trigger it, it’s still a tricky emotion to create. The danger in attempting to evoke pathos is sentimentality. Imagine, for example, if Ransetsu had written instead:

That poor, lonely, childless woman—

Isn’t it terribly sad how she tenderly strokes

and soothes the dolls!

If Ransetsu had written this overblown version, we’d sprint from the writer’s blatant appeal to our sympathy. It’s the restraint that Ransetsu exercises in understating the emotion that allows the reader to experience the feeling.

That’s something to keep in mind in trying to create pathos. Pathos is like mercury. It’s fluid. Unpredictable. It arrives in a sudden flash. Trying to force it to appear just doesn’t work. The writer has to create an authentic situation, and allow the pathos to flow into it, and once it does—capture it and snap the lid shut so it doesn't get away.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
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How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
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Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Why a Thesaurus Is of Limited Use to a Writer

Sometimes a writer is on a treasure hunt for a particular word, a specific one that will clinch a certain passage. The French have a phrase for that type of word. They call it le mot juste, the exact right word. The author Gustave Flaubert was famous for finding le mot juste in his novels, such as Madame Bovary. But what do you do as a writer if le mot juste is just not coming to mind, or if you can think of a word that has the right meaning, but it’s too cliché. 

Many writers turn to a thesaurus. That reference work is a great bestiary of words, holding almost all the synonyms in the English language. The word “thesaurus” literally means “treasury” in Latin—very appropriate.

I have nothing against thesauruses. I love just reading through them and seeing all the possible gradations of meaning that exist among different words that have almost the same definition, and how those synonyms differ slightly, partly because they are used in different contexts. In fact, when I was thirteen, one of my best friends nicknamed me Roget, I had such a crush on words.

The first English thesaurus was compiled by Dr. Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) in 1805, but the book was not published until 1852. Dr. Roget was a physician from London who served as a human subject for the earliest experiments on the use of nitrous oxide, or “laughing gas,” which he also wrote about. 

Dr. Peter Mark Roget

Roget’s first collection of synonyms was titled, Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. I’ll buy that a thesaurus can facilitate the expression of ideas, but I do believe it has limited use in literary composition.

Why? Because a word that a writer is seeking is almost never as obvious as a synonym of another word that a writer might reject as cliché language. Le mot juste most often appears out of nowhere, a word that surprises, delights, or shocks the reader. A thesaurus will not help a writer leap across a chasm to that sort of word. At best, the thesaurus will help a writer step over a narrow puddle.

Here is an example from a poem that Sylvia Plath wrote right before her untimely death on February 11, 1963. The very last poem in her Collected Poems, dated six days before she died, is titled “Edge.” Describing a woman who has passed away, leaving behind her children, Plath writes:

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals

Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

Interesting to think about a mother incorporating her children back into her—or maybe the subject of the poem is gathering into herself a kind of childishness in a flight from the tonnage of adulthood.

Sylvia Plath

If Plath had used a thesaurus to find the right word in this passage, she could never have come up with the stunning phrase “the garden//Stiffens and odors bleed/From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.”

Normally, a writer might say that a flower’s scent wafts. But that’s a cliché. If Plath had cast her net wider and looked in a thesaurus under waft, she would only have found drift, float, be carried, etc. More cliché language. You can’t get from tired language to more dynamic speech just with synonyms. A writer has to distort or wring the language till she arrives at something as vivid as a flower bleeding its odor. The search for le mot juste requires imagination, not just a reference work. Well, Plath might have gotten odor from a thesaurus. She could have started with the more conventional aroma or scent and then picked a synonym rarely paired with flower, because of its negative connotations. There, a thesaurus could be useful.

Another example. Three months earlier Plath had penned a poem called “The Childless Woman,” where she writes:

I spin mirrors,

Loyal to my image,

Uttering nothing but blood…

The usual verbs that describe emitting blood might be shed, ooze, spurt, seep, or trickle. (OK, I admit, I got this list from Roget’s Thesaurus.) But Plath goes so much deeper with the verb “Uttering.” The blood of this childless woman’s period is eloquent, it can speak of her emotions. Never could a thesaurus produce that result. It might even impede it. That’s why a writer has to be cautious in using a thesaurus. You can’t get deeper just by casting wider.

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Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack's most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer