Rain in poetry and music

When it’s raining, stay indoors, set the fireplace, lift to lips a cup of hot coffee—in between shutting your eyes, listen—rain on the roof, rain on the leaves, rain in the puddles, and rain up on the thick threads of rain. As its icy fingers seek you, read some poems as well. Let the rain of words soak you up.

Come rain, poets get it so irresistible. It is like raining inside them emotions of all kinds:  a flood of happiness, or everything from loneliness to sadness and solitude to nostalgia. As they move pen in their study, outside clouds tumble down from cloud-hills, and trees being bathed. 

Poets always try to capture rain in words.  American poet Emily Dickinson loved summer shower; and she wrote a beautiful one after it, “Summer Shower”.  Emily was very lonely, though born in a well-off family in 1830, rarely did she go out. People thought she was crazy who always wore white dress.

Wrapped up in herself, she wrote poems on death and immortality. But, only a few of her 1,800 poems got published when she was alive.  Died in 1886, she wasn’t the famous poet she became later, until her sister Lavinia found a cache of her poems. The “Summer Shower” is full of candour. See the opening below:

“A drop fell on the apple tree,
Another on the roof;
A half a dozen kissed the eaves,
And made the gables laugh.”

Summer rain tickled Emily. But to Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet of Victorian England, it was autumn rain; and he penned one ‘An Autumn Rain -Scene’, in 1904(?). Hardy loved villages and hated everything urban. Once he opposed construction of a rail that cut across villages. In one of his widely-read poems, “Throwing a tree”, Hardy’s anger against killing trees reaches a never-seen-before- pitch. To him, who loved nature, rain might have been a passion. He said as much in the ‘An Autumn- Rain Scene’:

“There trudges one to a merry-making 
With sturdy swing, 
On whom the rain comes down.”

Somebody is heading for some party, and rain falls on him. People in the poem are living their daily life, doing things they do every day, and in the midst of it all, ‘rain comes down’. Rain doesn’t care about your everyday life; it falls in all situations, be it merry or pain.

Walt Whitman, a major American poet, found a voice in rain, and asked it, “who art thou?”(Who are you?), in the poem ‘The voice of the rain’ as he reports his chat with the ‘soft-falling shower’. The rain said, “I am the Poem of Earth”, and added, “Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed, and yet the same”  

To poet Charles Bukowski, a cultural icon of Los Angeles, who died in 1994, rain brings to mind his difficult childhood in the USA. This German–born poet and novelist said that he had enough rain as a child in the poem, “We Ain’t Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain”.  It rained entire week, then his father had no work and the family no food. Whenever it rained, his father would become furious:

“My father, never a good man
at best, beat my mother
when it rained
as I threw myself
between them,
the legs, the knees, the
screams
until they
separated.
'I'll kill you,' I screamed
at him. 'You hit her again
and I'll kill you!”

How unpleasant it would have been for a boy! And, thanks to the difficult early life, the poet later spent his life in alcohol.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin or Pushkin was a poet for all senses. His love-poems to his beloved Anna Petrovna Kern contributed greatly to the Russian language. Pushkin, who was keen on nature, and rain, particularly, died in 1837 without seeing political changes in Russia and end of Tsar, who sternly observed his literary activities.

In Pushkin, rain was a melancholy that busy life today doesn’t want at all. A rainy day would have made his life lonelier. He had an eye for the beauty. Here are a few lines from his well known poem ‘Day’s rain is done’:      

“Day's rain is done. The rainy mist of night
Spreads on the sky, leaden apparel wearing,
And through the pine-trees, like a ghost appearing,
The moon comes up with hidden light.
All in my soul drags me to dark surrender.
There, far away, rises the moon in splendour.
There all the air is drunk with evening heat,
There move the waters in a sumptuous heat,
And overhead the azure skies...”

Other great poets to sing about rain include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, PB Shelly, Edith Louisa Sitwell, and Ross Clark. 

Now, you may be seeking rain in music, then, tune your ears to plentiful of great classic composers including Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or polish composer, Frédéric Chopin’s rain drops. Miracles happen in our times too. Listen to Greek-American pianist and composer Yanni’s “The Rain must fall’. You could find either Karen Briggs (in 1994 version) or Mary Simpson (in 2012 version) on violin — it is real rain with an orgasmic strain. Try the link below to savour Mary Simpson on violin.  

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