Rain, 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:The repetition of ‘rain’ (and its rhyme in ‘again’ and later, ‘pain’) is like
the monotonous drumming of the rain itself, a weary reiteration of word
in a thought which is itself not new (‘remembering again’). The poem has
only two sentences, and although the second begins with an attempt to
break away from his self-absorption (‘but here I pray’), it winds on with
two similes which drift away from this wish back to the speaker’s self:
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 towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.The verbless clauses from ‘either’ to ‘like me’ lie almost paratactically
suspended, succeeding one another in a ‘helpless’ drift back to the original
thought of being dissolved by the rain. Like ‘rain’, phrases and words such
as ‘solitude’ / ‘solitary’, ‘still’, ‘love’ and ‘broken reed’ come back; the
latter as if the speaker’s mind were fastening onto the phrase to find some
further meaning in it, but the former sufficiently far apart to make
Wordsworth’s idea that repetition arises from a ‘craving’ or ‘luxuriation’
in the mind sound rather too dynamic.^23 The craving in the speaker’s
mind here is beneath conscious enunciation; the words indicate the
irresistible gravitation of the voice back to its own situation ‘remembering
again’, for love of others returns to ‘love of death’, and their ‘lying still’
becomes the ‘still and stiff’ reeds ‘like me’. It is as if these words no longer
belonged entirely to the speaker’s active will, but mark the helpless drift of
his thoughts back to misery.
Yet the ending is not wholly abandoned to its own abandonment. In
doubting whether the perfection and reliability of death is really lovable,
72 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism