The Devil, now disguised as a half-wit peasant to Lars-Goren’s left, stood grinning, his blear eyes glittering.

18th c., attributed to Jonathan Swift, “The Story of Orpheus, Burlesqued,” in Walter Scott (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 2nd edition, 1883, Volume 10, p. 403,
Orpheus, a one-eyed blearing Thracian,
The crowder of that barb’rous nation,
Was ballad-singer by vocation;

The street-lamps blearing thro’ the rainy rout,
Each like a winking, sickly evil-eye.

1917, Madge Morris, The “Red Wind Blows” in The Lure of the Desert Land and Other Poems, San Francisco: Har Wagner, p. 83,
Let loose thy snow-winged dove, to rise
And fly across the seething blood-mad world.
To flutter over fields where that dread Silence is!
To light on upturned faces blearing at the skies
And curiously peck at dead men’s eyes.

He was useful to the man, for his sharp young eyes could pick up net or trawl buoys, white with a stripe of scarlet, far quicker than the rum-bleared eyes of his stepfather.

When winter blears bleakly the forest,
And the water binds gray to its blue,
Safe and sound in her covert I leave her,
Till spring calls again my canoe.

1888, David Atwood Wasson, “Babes of God” Part II in Poems, Boston: Lee & Shepard, p. 36,
Now, one among the foremost, looking up
By chance, with horror saw, in farthest sky
Fronting their course, a troublous film of cloud,—
A strange, dark, troublous film of cloud,—
Blearing the beauty of the crystal wall.

He stared at but did not see the bleared reflection of the flanking cherubs a hundred feet above the steel-grey veneer of water.

Blear

Meaning

Adj

Verb

Rhymes