Edward Thomas’s speaker lies awake in a bare hut, caught in the endless sound of rain at midnight. The downpour deepens his isolation, and his thoughts turn to his own mortality: one day he will no longer be there to hear the rain or feel its cleansing touch. Then his mind moves outward—he aches at the thought that someone he loves might be dying or lying awake just as he is, solitary and helpless. The poem’s mood is heavy with loneliness, yet the rain is almost a companion, washing away everything but the speaker’s strange attraction to death. In the final lines, he admits that the storm has dissolved all his loves except one—the love of what is perfect and cannot disappoint. That perfection is death itself, and the rain’s wild, impersonal rhythm seems to confirm it.
Rain — Summary
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: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying to-night 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.