Most poems about rain treat it as a mirror: the sky is gloomy because the speaker is sad. "I Think It Rains..." reverses this. Rain here is not a reflection of feeling but a replacement for speech. The poem opens with a guess, "I think it rains, / to show an emotion / that is otherwise unspoken," and the rest follows from that idea. Two people who cannot say what they feel let the weather say it for them, and by the end the weather and their bodies have become one thing.
The opening words matter. "I think" is tentative, as if the speaker is working out an explanation as they go. The poem never names a place, a quarrel or a season, so the situation is left open. All we are given is a silence ("Little is said") and a slow accumulation: "with every drop, the connection between / us grows stronger." The line break after "between" leaves the word hanging at the end of the line, so the gap between the two people is briefly visible before "us" closes it. Enjambment like this does quiet work throughout. "The wall that we both / built" splits "both" from the thing they built, and the sentence only finishes at "has fallen." Notice that the wall is built by both of them but falls with no one pushing it. Nobody tears it down. It collapses the way a saturated thing gives way, which fits the gradual logic of rain.
The wall is the poem's central image, and it carries a paradox. It was built "to guard our hearts," yet its fall brings relief: "We are no longer suffocating. / We are able to / take a deep breath." Protection, it turns out, was also confinement. The breathing imagery fits the rain closely, since rain clears heavy air. The short lines here, with "take a deep breath" given a line of its own, make the reader pause and breathe at the same moment as the speaker.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. That suits a poem about dropping defences, because it has no formal wall of its own. The lines are mostly short, often only three or four beats, which suits a speaker who has trouble talking. Then the lines lengthen: "Our vulnerabilities on full display" and "Our love is set free from the clouds" are the longest in the poem, as if the speaker grows more fluent as they grow more exposed. There is a small oddity in the capitalisation, where "Our" begins a new line after a comma, and it gives these lines a slightly formal, announcing quality. The abstract phrase "vulnerabilities on full display" is also the least vivid moment, because it tells us about nakedness rather than showing it. The poem is stronger when it stays with physical things, such as clouds, drops, breath and wet skin.
The most interesting image comes near the end. Love is "set free from the clouds," so love has been held up there like stored water, and rain is its release. Then the image shifts: "Our bodies soaked in each other's / tears." The rain and the weeping have merged, and we cannot tell which is weather and which is grief or joy. The word "each other's" makes the crying mutual, and placing "tears" alone on its own line gives it a moment of stillness before the finish.
That finish is the poem's real turn. Look at the pronouns. The poem begins with a single "I" thinking, moves through "we," "us" and "our" for almost its whole length, and ends with the plainest possible sentence: "I love you." After all the metaphor, the two people can finally speak. The line works because the poem has spent every line before it saying why the words were hard to reach. A declaration that might sound ordinary on its own feels earned here, and it is a human voice stepping out from behind the imagery.
What makes the poem worth reading is this movement from indirect to direct. It argues that some feelings need an intermediary, like rain, before they can be said aloud, and that the intermediary can then be dropped. It is a small, quiet poem, but it shows how a simple structure can carry a real emotional shift.