Most poems about rain keep it at a safe distance, on the far side of a window. Leigh Hunt's poem does the opposite. Its first word is "Open," and its sixteen lines are spent stripping away whatever stands between the speaker and the weather. The central idea is simple and a little radical: real rest comes not from shutting the night out but from letting it in, and a bedroom is better when it is porous to the storm.
The first stanza works through the senses, and each one is switched on in turn. Touch comes first, with air blowing "upon face and hair." Then comes the sharp command "Hark!", which turns the ear toward the rain, and then smell, as "the odorous limes are blown," the scented trees tossed about by the wind. The rain's "burthen" is a clever word choice. It is an old form of "burden," meaning a load, which suits rain falling "swift and prone," headlong and downward. It also meant the refrain of a song, and that second sense quietly prepares for the "lullabies" to come. The rain is both a weight and a tune.
The most surprising line in the stanza is "Stormy Love's abroad, and keeps / Hopeful coil for gentle sleeps." Love is personified as a roaming, turbulent presence, and "coil" means commotion or fuss. The paradox is that all this stir is organised for the sake of gentle sleep, as if the storm were a busy nurse getting the world ready for bed. The poem keeps pairing power with tenderness in this way. The very first image calls the rain's breath "sweet" and its "might" in the same phrase, and the later "sharp lullabies" does the same thing in miniature. Lullabies are meant to be soft, yet rain on leaves and glass is crisp and percussive. The oxymoron suggests comfort that doesn't need to be soothing in the usual sense.
The second stanza shifts from invitation to resolution. The first stanza is full of imperatives and exclamations, while the second is built on "shall" and "will": "Not a blink shall burn," "Nought will I have," "I will sleep." The speaker's wishes harden into vows. Artificial light is dismissed as "sordid," a surprisingly moral word for a lamp, which makes it seem not just unnecessary but dirty. Even the window-pane, already open in the first stanza, is wished away. The phrase "the air and the great good rain" is made almost entirely of plain, short words, and it has the blunt gratitude of a child's thanks.
Sight, the sense the first stanza never mentions, is finally dealt with by being closed down: "God's own darkness shall close mine eyes." Darkness is something given, not merely something that happens, and it does the speaker's work for him. The final line, "the pure earth-shadow of natural rest," makes a neat and slightly scientific point, since night really is the shadow cast by the earth. Sleeping under it becomes a way of joining the planet's own rhythm. The last two words, "natural rest," set themselves against the "sordid light" of line two, and so the poem ends where its argument has been heading all along, with the natural set above the manufactured.
The form supports this sense of ease. Both stanzas have eight lines of short, mostly four-beat verse, rhymed in couplets: air and hair, night and might, prone and blown, keeps and sleeps. The couplets arrive promptly, like drops landing one after another, and the loose, tumbling rhythm keeps the lines from sounding stiff. Some of the syntax is old-fashioned, as in "'Twixt me and the air," and the inversions give the poem a ceremonial feel, as if going to bed in the rain were a small ritual.
The poem's appeal lies in how fully it commits to its one idea. It never explains why the speaker wants this, and it doesn't need to. By the end, with the senses first awakened and then put to sleep, a reader understands the wish and may even share it.