Rain usually gets a bad press, in life and in poems, so the opening of Urna Mukherjee's "Days of Rain and Longing" is a small surprise. The clouds "veil the rising sun" and the raindrops "make a gloomy day for all but one." That last phrase is the hinge of the stanza. Everyone else is miserable, and the speaker steps forward in the next line with "I love the noiseless drizzle." The poem doesn't stay a simple celebration of weather, though. By the last line the speaker is "Longing for I know not what," and the rain turns out to be less the subject than the trigger for a restlessness that was already there.
The first half is built from sensory detail, much of it pleasantly contradictory. The drizzle is "noiseless," yet it becomes "a silent spring gushing forth," so silence and abundance share one image. The spray is "gambolling," a word normally used for lambs or children, which gives the weather a skip in its step. The trees sway "in unison," as if the whole landscape were moving to one tune. Then the umbrella, held "in vain," gives up, and the scene dissolves into "a misty blur of green and blue." Judging by the imagery, the edges between tree, sky and water are blurring, and the speaker welcomes it by choosing to "willingly lose my way!" There is a quiet joke in the geography. The wind "blows north," a precise compass point, and two lines later the speaker has no sense of direction at all. Being lost is the pleasure.
"On days like these I often wish" marks the turn inward, and the vocabulary follows. The water outside becomes water within, with the "fathomless deep of my soul" as an inner sea. What the speaker wishes for is "a quaint something," and "quaint" is a curious choice. It suggests something small, old-fashioned and oddly charming rather than a grand passion. The speaker can describe its quality but not its name: "I know it not at all." The inverted phrasing returns in the final line, "I know not what," so the last two stanzas are bracketed by the same admission.
The closing stanza sets two kinds of thirst against each other. The rain is now a "soothing draught" that "Waters the sweet forget-me-not," and the language of drinking and nourishment makes the flower's satisfaction plain. The speaker, by contrast, is "Famished and arduous" and burns. Fire in the middle of a downpour is the poem's sharpest paradox. The flower's name adds an irony. A forget-me-not stands for remembrance, yet the speaker cannot remember, or perhaps has never known, what is being longed for. "Arduous" is also stretched. It normally describes a task, not a person, and using it here makes the longing sound like labour, something tiring to carry.
The form is plain and song-like. There are five quatrains, each rhyming on the second and fourth lines: sun/one, forth/north, spray/way, soul/all, not/what. The fourth pair is only a near-rhyme, built on the shared "l" sound. The rhythm is loose, with roughly three or four beats a line, and short lines like "I love the noiseless drizzle" almost tumble along. The unrhymed first and third lines leave each stanza slightly open, which suits a poem about drifting. The dash after "north" lets the sentence run on into the next stanza, as if the wind were carrying it.
The poem is modest in scale, but it is worth reading for how honestly it ends. It doesn't solve the longing, and it doesn't pretend the rain can. The "all but one" of the first stanza also deepens in retrospect. The speaker is the one person who loves the rain, and also the one who feels something nobody else seems to share. The weather works as a mirror for a feeling with no name, and the poem is content to leave that feeling unnamed.