Synonyms:
pathos, poignancy
Meaning: a quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow); "the film captured all the pathos of their situation"
Usage examples
PATHOS.
He thought of the magnificent pathos of his dead body.
A dreadful phrase, haunting in its pathos, crept into his mind.
The ceremony of burial was performed with all solemnity and pathos.
Every one knows the soul-subduing pathos of the funeral service, for who is so fortunate as never to have followed some one he has loved to the tomb?
The reply of a grizzled fire engineer standing at O'Farrell Street and Van Ness Avenue, beside a blackened engine, may not have been as terse as that of Hugo's guardsman at Waterloo, but the pathos of it must have been as great.
There were certain dastardly deeds, certain acts of profanation, certain lies, at which those hordes that came to us from Asia hesitated; an instinctive reverence still restrained them; and, moreover, in those times they did not destroy with such impudent cynicism, invoking the God of Christians in a burlesque pathos of prayer!