A hand held out to catch the rain is a small, exposed gesture, and gwyn's "ode to rain" opens with it: "drops of water fall on my outstretched hand / i sat waiting for the rain to land." The speaker is patient and open, ready to receive whatever falls. By the end that openness has turned into weary defiance. The poem addresses a former partner who ignored and deceived the speaker, and its central idea is a contrast. Rain can be waited for, felt and wiped away, but the damage done by someone who didn't care cannot.
The title promises an ode, a form traditionally devoted to praise, but the rain is only a stand-in. Within two lines the poem turns to "you and me," and the weather becomes a way of talking about a relationship. The comparison is loose, and it is a little unclear how falling rain is "like you and me," but the next line gives the sense: "memories out in the open for us to see." Rain is visible, shared and falling on everyone at once, much like memories. Then comes the poem's most interesting line: "the rain dried up, the essence never did." The shower ends, as showers do, but what it meant stays behind. That sets up the whole poem, since the pain outlasts the event that caused it.
The second half sets two people side by side who react to the same moment in opposite ways. The speaker cries; the other "never batted an eyelid." The speaker is "heartbroken"; the other is "too busy watching the snow." Snow is also precipitation, but it is cold and silent. The speaker's tears and the rain are warm and wet, while the other person looks calmly at something colder. The poem also uses self-answered questions: "didn't you know? / no," and "did you care? no." The speaker replies on the other person's behalf, as if the silence has been heard so often that the answer is no longer in doubt. The blunt accusation "all you ever told was lies" belongs to the same plain, unpolished voice.
The form is simple. The poem is written in rhyming couplets (hand/land, did/eyelid, know/snow), with a loose rhythm of about ten syllables per line at first. The lines stretch as the speaker's feelings build: "you have absolutely no idea what you did to me" runs well past the earlier lines, like a sentence that won't stay contained. The lowercase "i" and the sparse, uneven punctuation give it the feel of a private note, not a polished performance. Some rhymes are predictable, but the plainness suits a speaker who is trying to say something true rather than something ornate.
The ending is more subtle than it first appears. The final two couplets reuse earlier rhymes, "me/see" and "away/day," so the poem seems to circle back on itself, like a mind stuck on the same thought. The word "see" changes meaning along the way. In the second stanza memories are "out in the open for us to see," but later the speaker admits of the promised rainbow, "i can't see." The rainbow is the other person's cheerful reassurance that things will improve after the storm. It is easy to say and, to the speaker, impossible to believe, perhaps partly because tears blur the view. The phrase "another day" also shifts. First it measures how long the memory will last: "i'll remember. at least for another day." That qualifier is an honest, deflating touch, since the speaker will not claim to remember forever. In the last line the phrase becomes a possible meeting: "i don't care if i see you another day."
That final claim of not caring echoes the earlier question "did you care?" and turns the other person's indifference back on them. Whether the speaker truly feels it is open to doubt, because the poem has just insisted that "you have absolutely no idea what you did to me." "Let the rain wash me away" can mean cleansing, or it can mean disappearing, and the poem does not choose between them. "Alas" adds a touch of mock-formality, a nod to the "ode" of the title.
The poem is significant because it takes the most familiar comparison in sad poetry, rain as sorrow, and tests it against experience. Rain, the speaker finds, is a poor model for heartbreak because rain goes away. The poem is worth reading for that small, accurate observation and for its unguarded voice.