Few poems begin by turning a cliché inside out as neatly as this one. "We are not fair weather friends of death after all" borrows an everyday phrase about unreliable companions and gives it a grim twist. If we were fair weather friends, we would only turn up when conditions were pleasant. The second stanza shows what loyalty looks like instead: people standing "Engulfed in shards of rain and wind." The idiom becomes literal, and the weather turns into a test of faithfulness. "Shards" is a hard, sharp word for rain, and it makes the storm feel hostile, almost as if the sky were breaking over the mourners.
Judging by the imagery, the setting is a graveyard or funeral, and the line "It's almost twenty years now" suggests that the speaker is marking a long-ago loss. The poem never says who died, and that restraint matters. The grief belongs to a group, "we," and the poem keeps the circumstances as open as the word itself. The mourners "stand around / Reading someone else's grief and praises, / And weeping our own griefs." The phrase "someone else's" could mean the words of a funeral service, or perhaps the inscriptions on nearby graves. Either way, the speakers borrow language for a feeling that is really their own. The plural "griefs" is also telling. Each person is weeping for a different loss, so the crowd is united in mourning but separated in what it mourns.
The poem's central image is death as a mouth. First it is "closed," and the mourners stand outside it, shut out and waiting. Then it is "open," and some people lie down inside it "To taste the mustiness of eternity." The contrast is striking. Those who enter death get taste and smell, the senses of a cellar or an old book, and "mustiness" deflates the grand word "eternity" by making it stale and damp. The poem does not say exactly who these people are. They might be the dead themselves, or those who seem to court death, and the ambiguity is part of its unease. What is clear is the dividing line that follows: "But we come for those it's taken." The living do not come to meet death. They come for the people it has swallowed, and that makes the mourners' stance about love rather than morbid curiosity.
The form supports this plainness. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, the diction is everyday, and the stanzas are uneven, as if the speaker were stopping and starting. The repeated "stand" ("We stand before," "We stand around") keeps the mourners fixed in place, while the sibilance of "shards," "stand," "closed" and "mustiness" gives the poem a hushed, whispering quality. Even the tone of the middle section is understated. "In death the body is diminished" is a quiet, almost clinical statement. The poem chooses "diminished" over a more dramatic word like "destroyed," so the loss is made small and physical, a matter of shrinking rather than spectacle.
The ending is where the poem becomes more than a funeral scene. "And the soul is, what?" breaks off on a comma and a blank. The speaker reaches for a word and cannot find one. Then comes the final question: "What can anyone say about the soul / Except for precisely where it's not?" This is a clever, bitter turn. We can point to the body in the coffin and say the soul is not there, but we cannot say where it is or what it is. The word "precisely" is ironic, because it promises exactness just as the poem admits it has none. All the confident language of funerals, the readings and praises, is quietly undercut. People can speak with certainty only about absence.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not comfort the mourners with promises of an afterlife, and it does not dismiss belief either. It stays in the uncomfortable space between the closed mouth and the open one, with rain on the face and a question that "almost twenty years" has not answered. For a reader, the poem's lasting effect is a sense of shared and stubborn loyalty. We keep standing in the weather for the dead, even though we do not know what we are standing before.