Poetry Group
Question:
zippybrown
Student
Analyse the poem 'Rain' by Edward Thomas.
Please include themes, symbols, style, poetic technique (biography not necessary unless it is relevant to the poem)
Answers:
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mstultz72 Teacher
High School - 12th GradeeNotes Editor
Posted by mstultz72 on Saturday September 26, 2009 at 2:10 PMRain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me,
disappoint."Rain" belongs to the World War I school of poetry which depicts the horrors and alienation of modern trench warfare (think Wilfred Owen and All Quiet on the Western Front).
Usually, rain is a motif that renews, baptizes, purges. But the rain imagery here is a dirge which welcomes death, a morbid rain dance. The speaker seems like he is separated between trenches, in a literal and metaphorical "No Man's Land." He likens himself to a "broken reed" in "cold water." His wish is for death, for the rain to wash "me cleaner than I have been / Since I was born into this solitude," an existential spoof of a Christian prayer.
The speaker uses Psalm-like allusion to both to bless the dead and to curse his condition. He speaks with intense introspection and uses hyperbole ("myriads of broken reeds"), which juxtaposes his lonliness with the thousands of other soldiers in the trenches. All in all, "Rain" evokes a Hemingway-esque "lost generation" mood.
