A poem that opens by grumbling about poems is already winking at its reader. "So many poems are about poems," the speaker says, and then lists who actually reads them: other poets, and "a few" grieving people "hunting for a match for the eulogy." It is a funny, slightly deflating picture of poetry's audience. Underneath the joke sits a serious idea. Poetry, the speaker says, "taps into our mournful centers," and we turn to it for "certain sounds more than meanings," content with "a sense of knowing" and "satisfied with suggestions." The rest of the poem puts that claim into practice.
The turn comes mid-stanza, with no warning. After "nineteen days of sunshiny cold," the city goes back to "its better-known self." The phrase is quietly clever. Rain is not an interruption here but the city's true identity, and the dry spell is the deviation. The next lines build that identity from small, sensory pieces: "wet-streaked windows," "rain-soaked smells of soil," "swishings of cars through shallows / where streets once stretched." The last image is the best. The streets have turned into water, so the road is something remembered, and "stretched" recalls how they used to lie flat and dry.
The sounds are worth slowing down for, since the poem has just told us that sound matters more than meaning. Hissing, soft consonants run through the weather passage: "sunshiny," "streaked," "soaked," "smells," "swishings," "shallows." You can almost hear tires on wet pavement. The same sounds return in "shocking pink" and "severed box lids," so the rain's soundscape seeps into the next image. The poem makes no use of end rhyme. It is free verse in eight two-line stanzas, with long, conversational lines that often spill over the stanza breaks. "Or a sense // of knowing" is the clearest case, where the line and the stanza both break on the word "sense," as if the speaker were reaching for certainty and stopping short.
The city's "preparations for mysteries" are the poem's oddest and most suggestive image. They consist of "knitting shocking pink hats and scrawling slogans on severed box lids." Judging by the imagery, these are the handmade tools of public protest or gathering: yarn and flattened cardboard, made at home and carried into the streets. The poem never says what the mysteries are, which fits its own preference for suggestion over explanation. The contrast does the work. "Shocking pink" is loud against the gray, wet backdrop, and "severed" is a harsh word for something as ordinary as a cardboard lid. It foreshadows the poem's final word.
That word is "corpse," and it arrives after a deliberately uncertain sentence. "No one knows whether a frozen patch / of hard clear days or a week of warm deluges / lies ahead, not until we get there / and witness the corpse." Weather forecasting is the surface subject, but the grammar pulls in something larger. We can only know what a stretch of time was once it is over and laid out before us, like a body at a funeral. The earlier "eulogy" and "mournful centers" now frame the whole poem. The ending pays off the opening, and the poem circles back to its own subject, grief and the poetry we reach for in it. Even the pairing of "hard clear days" with "warm deluges" reverses expectation, since the dry days are cold and the wet ones warm. That is one more way the future refuses to be predicted.
The title, "I Never Mind the Rain," appears nowhere in the poem's lines, so it works like a quiet confession from outside the text. The speaker does not mind the rain, and the poem suggests why. Rain belongs to the city's "better-known self," and the uncertainty it brings is a condition we share, to be met with hats and signs and, perhaps, poems.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it admits its limits and then goes on to show what it can do. It mocks self-absorbed poetry while being a little self-aware itself. It claims that poems offer only "suggestions," then lets rain, pink wool and a single hard final word suggest a good deal. For a reader new to poetry, it shows that a poem can be about something as plain as the weather and still reach toward loss and the unknown.