Hans Ostrom’s “And Now, Whether” opens with the cadence of a broadcast but quietly changes one letter: “Today’s whether report” is not about rain or sun but about the chances of not knowing. That single homophone turns a familiar public ritual—the weather forecast—into an account of inner weather. The poem forecasts “increasing perplexity,” “quandaries,” and “wonderstorms,” treating confusion and awe as atmospheric systems that move through a day. Its central idea is wryly paradoxical: the only dependable prediction is uncertainty, yet even within that uncertainty there may be “a possibility of patchy meaning late.”
The structure borrows the temporal logic of a weather bulletin. In three tercets, the speaker moves through morning, afternoon, tonight, and tomorrow, just as a forecast tracks a front. Each tercet is a single sentence, so the poem reads as three forecast updates, and the absence of rhyme or strict metre keeps the voice conversational. Yet the line breaks create their own small hesitations. “Followed by intermittent / quandaries” pauses at the word “intermittent” before revealing what is intermittent, enacting the stop-start quality of the mental weather it describes. Later, the break after “there’s” in “though there’s / a possibility of patchy meaning late” briefly delays the one hopeful note, making it feel tentative and uncertain. That enjambment is not decorative; it makes the poem’s form mirror its subject.
The imagery repurposes meteorology for the mind. “Increasing perplexity in the morning hours” sounds like cloud building on a horizon; “intermittent quandaries in the afternoon” resembles scattered showers of doubt. The standout coinage, “wonderstorms,” fuses wonder with thunderstorms, so that astonishment and disturbance arrive together, with storm-like intensity. Tomorrow is “fraught / with absurdity,” as though absurdity were a heavy air mass pressing in. Finally, “patchy meaning late” borrows the language of patchy fog: clarity may come only in places, and only toward the end of the forecast—or perhaps the end of a life. The word “whether” remains the key. It sounds like “weather” but introduces alternatives, so the entire poem forecasts standing between possibilities rather than any single outcome.
Sound works alongside imagery. The alliteration of “perplexity” and “possibility of patchy” links confusion to the faint hope of meaning, while the soft consonants of “wonderstorms tonight” make the storm feel more eerie than violent. The tone is deadpan, as if the speaker were reading a perfectly ordinary report: “Tomorrow ought to be fraught / with absurdity” is delivered without alarm. That calm is significant. The poem does not treat doubt as a crisis to be solved. Instead, Ostrom reframes it as a condition to forecast, observe, and perhaps even enjoy.
What makes the poem significant is the economy with which it reimagines a heavy human worry. Rather than promising clarity, it lowers the stakes: meaning may be patchy, late, and merely possible, but that possibility is worth watching for. The word “late” hovers between “late in the day” and “late in life,” so the poem addresses both ordinary daily confusion and larger existential uncertainty. By turning the mind into a climate, it suggests that uncertainty is not something we escape; it is something we weather. The best response, the poem implies, is not to demand a clear forecast but to pay attention to the wonderstorms as they pass.