Edward Thomas’s poignant poem ‘Rain’ was composed in 1916, during a time when Thomas was entrenched in the harrowing realities of war. This poem encapsulates his solitary experience of sitting in a hut throughout a long, rainy night, reflecting on his own mortality and the fates of his fellow soldiers amidst the tumult of World War I.
Sadly, Thomas himself would lose his life at the Battle of Arras in 1917, merely a year after penning ‘Rain’. Below is a summary of the poem followed by a thoughtful analysis that delves into its language, motifs, and striking imagery.
Summary
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
The speaker finds himself in a desolate hut at the stroke of midnight, likely located in the war-torn landscapes of northern France or Belgium. The relentless sound of rain pounding on the roof envelops him as he contemplates his own mortality. The war forces him to confront the imminent nature of death; when he ultimately passes away, he will neither hear the soothing rain nor express gratitude for its cleansing essence.
He feels ‘cleaner’—this sense of purity may be interpreted not only in a literal sense but also as a spiritual or psychological renewal, one that he has not experienced since his very birth.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff.
The speaker now offers blessings to those who have already succumbed to death—particularly his comrades in arms. He expresses a fervent hope that none of his beloved friends are suffering tonight, either dying or lying awake, alone and listening to the rain. Even if they are alive, they feel utterly powerless, akin to the speaker himself, caught in the throes of war’s chaos. The imagery of cold water amidst broken reeds evokes a sense of lifelessness and despair; the rigid reeds symbolize the dead, while the water, although life-giving, cannot revive or mend what has been lost.
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
In the closing lines of the poem, Thomas acknowledges that the ‘wild rain’ has ‘dissolved’ all the loves he has ever known—save for his profound love for death itself. This love for death signifies an escape to perfection, unburdened by the trials and tribulations that life presents. As suggested by the storm outside, death promises a release from the enduring pains of existence.
Analysis
The term ‘rain’ resounds throughout this brief yet impactful lyric. The repetition of the word ‘rain’—appearing eight times—coupled with the poem’s iambic pentameter, effectively conveys the relentless drumming of rain on the hut’s roof and evokes the monotony of this sound. ‘Rain’ is crafted in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Nevertheless, the recurrence of similar words at the end of lines introduces a subtle counterpoint to the notion of complete ‘blankness’: while lacking a formal rhyme scheme, the line endings exhibit semantic and phonetic echoes. For example, ‘rain’ concludes three lines, while ‘die’, ‘dead’, and ‘death’ provide a somber conclusion to three additional lines. The words ‘sympathy’ and ‘me’ share a distant rhyme, while ‘awake’ and ‘rain’ resonate through assonance, as do ‘reeds’ and ‘dead’.
This flexibility in line endings, alongside the blank verse form, allows Thomas to articulate the sprawling nature of his contemplations and the wildness of the rain. The echoes and near-rhymes at the ends of certain lines hint at the limitations of his perspective; he cannot wholly embrace a Romantic view of nature as a source of solace and renewal, which is often found in the works of poets like Wordsworth.
Indeed, Edward Thomas is frequently regarded as a late Romantic figure, akin to many of the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century with whom he is sometimes associated. ‘Rain’ embodies numerous elements of Romanticism, echoing themes from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others: the solitary poet immersed in introspection, pondering life and death amidst the natural world, with the weather and elements—here, personified by the rain—serving as a catalyst for such reflections.
Yet, unlike traditional Romantic experiences, ‘Rain’ lacks an overarching sense of transcendence, offering only the hope of it in the future. As the poem suggests, death ‘[c]annot, the tempest tells me, disappoint’. But only time will reveal the truth of this statement.
‘Rain’ as War Poetry
‘Rain’ stands as one of Edward Thomas’s most cherished poems, providing a nuanced perspective on war that contrasts sharply with the more overtly patriotic sentiments expressed by poets like Rupert Brooke (notably in ‘The Soldier’) and the stark realism found in Wilfred Owen’s works (for instance, ‘Futility’). Our analysis of ‘Rain’ has endeavored to illustrate how Thomas manages to compose a Romantic war poem that refrains from glorifying the conflict itself. The poem’s subtle ambiguity invites readers to ponder its dual nature: how pessimistic is this work, and how celebratory? It is this very complexity that makes ‘Rain’ a remarkable piece of poetry.