Have you got any recommendations for a rainy day? If you enjoyed this list, continue to brave the elements with our list of classic poems about snow and winter. That concludes our pick of the best rain poems. Why? What is it about this filmic image that holds such appeal for him? We have analysed this poem here. Even if one of the actors’ native twang or brogue breaks in while they’re speaking in the false accent they’ve adopted for the film, or poor editing means the boom mic is in shot, or a clunky speech by one of the female characters betrays the film’s origins in a play (imperfectly adapted for the big screen), a film that opens with atmospheric views of rainfall will always be a winner for the poet. ‘Rain’ is a fine example of such an attitude to the poet’s craft and responsibility: describing his own fondness for films that ‘start with rain’ or open with shots of a ‘downpour’, Paterson goes on to say that even the worst or overly long film can ‘do no wrong’ in his eyes, if it opens with rain on a ‘starlit gutter’. Paterson has expressed the opinion that the more complex an idea or emotion is, the more onus there is on the poet to express themselves clearly. The triplet with which the poem concludes is beautifully effective. Published in the New Yorker in 2008 and written by one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets, this poem is a meditation on the various uses of rain in films, written in rhyming (and half-rhyming) tetrameters. Focusing on her house and the weather the house endures, Bishop gradually describes local details through innovative use of rhyme and half-rhyme, bringing the house to life. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘ Song for the Rainy Season‘.īishop was one of the greatest female poets of the twentieth century, and this is one of our favourites among her poems. As well as being a fine modern nature poem, it’s also – given the circumstances of its composition – a war poem and, indeed, a religious poem.ĩ. Written in 1940 during the Second World War, ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is perhaps Sitwell’s best-known poem. The mention of ‘celebrities’ and ‘refugees’ (uneasily rhymed on purpose here) makes this a curiously modern poem – a poem for our times as well as of its time.Ĩ. Indeed, Lewis was an admirer of Thomas’s poetry and ‘All Day It Has Rained’ might be considered his tribute to Thomas’s rainy war poem. Like Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’, this rain poem is also a war poem – though Lewis was a poet of the Second, rather than the First World War. Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy groundĪnd from the first grey wakening we have found … Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors, And speaking of love of death, the next poem on this list also embraces this subject …Īll day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors Like many of Edward Thomas’s poems, ‘Rain’ has a simple setting: the speaker, sheltering from the rain alone in a hut, muses upon his loved ones miles away and on death and the ‘love of death’. Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rainĪnd neither hear the rain nor give it thanksīlessed are the dead that the rain rains upon … Hardy’s use of the refrain ‘the years O!’ calls to mind not only the passing of time but also the years marked on those gravestones, alongside the names: ‘Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.’Įdward Thomas’s poem ‘Rain’ was written in 1916, while Thomas was fighting in the trenches: Emma, like her parents, is now in that ‘high new house’ of heaven, and all that remains of her is the name on her gravestone and Hardy’s memories of her. The poem sees Hardy recalling his first wife Emma’s childhood life in Devon with her family. This poem is structured like a song, with a repeated refrain at the beginning and end of each verse or stanza. How the sick leaves reel down in throngs …
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