Kindness is often praised as its own reward, but Craig Rozniecki's "Rain In My Eyes" asks what happens when it isn't. The speaker wakes every day hoping to be "a ray of sunshine to others," and the first half of the poem is a small catalogue of his good deeds: groceries for an elderly woman, directions for a blind man, support for a friend, a lost child reunited with his parents. Then the poem turns. The speaker looks back for help of his own and finds "no one." Its central idea is the quiet loneliness of the person who always gives, and the way unanswered generosity can leave someone feeling invisible.
The form carries much of this feeling. Every line ends in a comma, and the poem's only full stop comes on its last line. It reads as one long, unbroken sentence, so the good deeds, the disappointment and the storm all seem to flow out of the speaker without a pause. Even the bleakest moment, "But find no one," is followed by a comma rather than a stop, as if the silence is not allowed to settle. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the line lengths vary. That plainness makes the poem sound like someone talking himself through his day. The blunt, short line about finding no one drops sharply after the longer, more hopeful lines before it.
The most human moment comes in the middle. The speaker insists he is "Not expecting anything in return," yet admits he still "cling[s] to hope" that someone will help him "voluntarily," "without my asking." The verb "cling" suggests a grip that is already slipping. The word "voluntarily" shows his pride: kindness he had to ask for would not be the kindness he wants. The contradiction makes the speaker believable. He is not a saint, just a decent person with an ordinary wish to be noticed.
The people he helps are oddly thin. They are types, "an elderly woman," "a blind man," "a child," and their thanks is "the lone word emanating from their mouths." "Emanating" is a stiff, formal choice, as if gratitude were something given off like heat rather than said. The world of the poem is polite but hollow, with "Speech minimal" and everyone "looking after themselves." There is also a sad irony in who gets helped. The blind man reaches his destination and the child finds his parents, but when the speaker needs someone to find him, nobody is there. Perhaps the passers-by who do not look are a little like the blind man, though they have no excuse.
Weather ties the poem together. The opening line claims his cheerfulness is independent of it: "Whether the skies be clear or clouded." By the end the sky has overruled him. The storm builds in three steps: "clouds plentiful and ominous," then "a few sprinkles," then rain that "comes crashing down." This follows the speaker's hope as it fades, and the passive "are then felt" suggests a man to whom things simply happen. The central image also reverses. At the start he hopes to be a ray of sunshine; at the end he is "Looking for that ray of sunshine," now needing what he used to supply. With no one to turn to, he looks up at the sky instead.
The final couplet is the cleverest. Rain does not normally make eyes "burn," but crying does, so the downpour seems to be partly the speaker's own grief. "Coalescing," the most scientific word in an otherwise plain poem, describes rain and tears merging until they cannot be told apart. One reading is that the rain hides his crying, which suits a poem about a man no one sees. The poem ends on the word "eyes," which returns us to the title.
Part of the poem's significance is that it does not moralise. The speaker does not curse anyone or promise to stop helping, and nothing is resolved. The poem simply shows how small acts of goodness can go unreturned, and leaves readers to wonder who in their own lives gives quietly and whether anyone has noticed.