Four kinds of weather take turns hitting the speaker in the opening lines of Dominique Cyprès's "Battered by the Rain," and the speaker never flinches. Rain batters, wind bowls over, snow turns the speaker into a "supplicant," and the summer sun "sizzles," a verb that belongs in a frying pan more than in the sky and gives the catalogue a flicker of self-mockery. Then comes the surprise: "this was all i hoped to be." The speaker doesn't want to conquer the elements or hide from them, only to be the thing they land on. The poem's central idea is that a life of deliberate smallness, unrecognized and undemanding, can be a form of devotion rather than a failure.
The first stanza turns on its plainest admission, "almost too tired to walk sometimes," and then on a pairing of words that usually fight each other: "consumed willingly by a longing that sought no end." To be consumed sounds like victimhood, but "willingly" makes it a choice, and a longing with no end is not one that expects to be satisfied. The stanza closes on its richest image, "the warm flame of cosmic love / in the streetlights reflected on wet pavement." The rain from the title comes back, no longer an attacker but the surface that makes the light visible. The grandest phrase in the poem, "cosmic love," is tied to the humblest source, and the light is only a reflection, something you notice if you are walking head down through the wet.
The second stanza shrinks the world to a list: a bunk, a desk, drawers, pop-tarts, lentil soup. "Bunk" suggests a barracks or a monk's cell, and the inventory is monastic until the pop-tarts arrive and gently spoil any solemnity. The line "some pop-tarts and" stops on a conjunction, as if the speaker were adding things almost apologetically. The soup comes "each day," which makes routine sound like ritual. The language here has no metaphors at all, so the style thins out along with the wants.
In the final stanza the syntax holds its breath. Two "if" clauses, one about demonstrators on first avenue and one about a friend needing the F train at two a.m., never receive a "then." Instead the poem drifts into fragments about being "pushed along the sidewalk by the throngs" and "pressed on all sides by other riders on the six." The place names fix the scene in New York, and they appear in lowercase like everything else. The poem has no capitals and no punctuation, so its own voice is as unassuming as the self it describes. The verbs "pushed" and "pressed" echo "battered" and "bowled over," and the echo suggests that the crowd is another weather system. Yet the speaker is useful within it: standing "to bear witness," a phrase with a faintly religious weight, and leading a friend to her train. The speaker's goodness consists of showing up, doing the small task, and being one body among thousands.
The ending withholds the grammar that was promised and delivers a verdict instead: "content to remain unrecognized wherever i went / that was the only person / i knew how to be." The line break leaves "person" alone at the end of a line before "i knew how to be" arrives. "Knew" and the earlier "hoped" are past tense, and the poem seems to be looking back. Judging by the text, we cannot tell whether that self was outgrown, lost, or simply remembered with tenderness, and that uncertainty keeps the poem from becoming a slogan.
There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The music comes from sound and line length: the hard b's of "battered," "bowled," "bunk," and "bear," and the p's of "pushed," "pressed," "pavement," and "pop-tarts," which give the speech a bumping, jostled feel. The poem matters because it runs against the habit of treating recognition as the goal of a life. It proposes anonymity as something chosen, even joyful, and finds the cosmic in a puddle of reflected light, an unglamorous train line, and a bowl of soup.