Most poems about rain tell us how it feels to be caught in it. Frank Marshall Davis does something stranger and more playful. He imagines rain as a person, then puts that person somewhere his sound can be heard. The result is a frail old man shuffling through a music store, plucking at the instruments while nobody is looking. The central idea is that a wet afternoon is not dull or silent but a small, private concert.
The poem is built from metaphor alone. Davis never mentions drops, puddles or storms. Two matching stanzas each begin with "Today", which pins the scene to one particular afternoon, and each ends on the same line, "in a music store." That repetition works like a refrain in a song. It also plays a trick on us. The first time we reach it, the comparison turns into a setting: the rain is not like a man in a music store, it simply is one.
The first stanza sharpens its portrait one line at a time: "an aged man / a gray old man / a curious old man." Each line has nearly the same shape, but each adjusts the picture. "Aged" is plain fact. "Gray" suggests the colour of a rainy sky and of an old man's hair at once. "Curious" moves from looks to character, as if the rain were nosing around, poking at whatever it touches. The short, even lines also fall one after another like drops, though that may be a pleasing accident of the form.
The second stanza repeats the pattern with a stranger image: "houses / are strings of a harp." Judging by the imagery, Davis is picturing rain falling in long vertical lines past roofs and walls until the whole street looks strung up like an instrument. "Soprano harp strings / bass harp strings" suggests high and low notes, perhaps the different sounds rain makes on small and large roofs. The poem leaves us to work this out, and the puzzle is part of the fun.
In the third stanza the pattern breaks. The lines grow longer and the poem begins to move, carried by active verbs: the old man "strums," he is "picking," then he "dodders away." His "thin long fingers" are easy to read as thin streaks of rain. The sound turns musical here too. "Weary jingle" and "soft jazzy jangle" share their opening sound and their ringing endings, and they are the closest the poem comes to rhyme. Everywhere else it is free verse, with short, uneven lines that sound more like a murmur than a beat. The word "jazzy" tells us what kind of music this is: loose, improvised, a little tired. "Weary" gives the rain a gentle melancholy, so it is no violent downpour.
The ending is the cleverest part. "Then dodders away / before the boss comes 'round . . ." turns the old man into a loiterer who has been playing instruments he has no intention of buying and slips off before he is caught. It is funny, and the word "boss" brings in the everyday world of shops and supervisors. The poem never says who the boss is. One reasonable guess is the returning sun, or whatever power decides when the weather changes. The trailing dots let the sound fade out as a shower does, rather than finishing with a full stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. A single comparison is extended into a tiny story with an arrival, a performance and a getaway, and the plain, spoken words keep it from feeling laboured. The tone is affectionate toward the old man and toward the rain. There is also a quieter thought underneath. If the old man must play in stolen moments, then the music of an ordinary rainy day is something borrowed, brief and easy to miss. After reading the poem, a listener might hear the next downpour differently.