A Summary and Analysis of ‘Rain’ by Edward Thomas

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Rain’ was written in 1916, while Thomas was fighting in the trenches. ‘Rain’ is about Thomas’s experience of sitting in a hut all night alone, listening to the rain falling and meditating on his death and on the fates of his fellow soldiers in the First World War.

Edward Thomas would himself be killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, a year after he wrote ‘Rain’. What follows is a summary of the poem, followed by a brief analysis of some of its language, motifs, and images.

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 of the poem sits in a hut at midnight. The setting is wartime, probably somewhere in northern France or Belgium. He can hear the rain hammering on the roof of the hut, where he sits alone, and he is reminded of his mortality.

When he dies (and war will encourage a person to consider their own mortality in an altogether more imminent and urgent sense), he will no longer hear the rain, and he will not be able to give thanks to it for washing him clean.

Indeed, he feels ‘cleaner’ – perhaps in a spiritual or psychological sense as well as literal one – than he has done since his 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 blesses those dead: those people (especially his fellow soldiers) who have already died and in that state of nothingness which the speaker knows will come to him one day, too.

The religious overtones present in the earlier talk of rain washing him cleaner are now made more explicit: as well as blessing the dead, the speaker prays that nobody whom he once loved is dying this very night – or even, if not dying, lying awake and listening to the rain wherever they are.

Although they are not dead (or dying), these loved ones feel helpless, much like the speaker, unable to change or affect things during the war. They are like cold water among the broken reeds of a riverbank: the ‘stiff’ reeds (suggesting the stiffness of dead bodies) cannot be moved or mended (or brought back to life?) by the mere presence of water, even though water does itself have the ability to grow and sustain life.

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.

Thomas concludes the poem by acknowledging that the ‘wild rain’ has ‘dissolved’ all of the loves he has ever felt – except the love of death. Death is a way of achieving perfection – free from the worries and troubles of living – and, as the storm raging outside seems to hint, death promises release from all of the pain and hardship of life.

Analysis

The word ‘rain’ comes at us repeatedly in this short lyric. Repetition of the word ‘rain’ (eight times) as well as the iambic pentameter employed with its (largely) regular metre, help to convey the repetitive hammering of the rain on the roof of the hut, and the monotony of the sound.

‘Rain’ is written in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. And yet the repetition of the same or similar words at the ends of the lines also goes against the idea that this ‘verse’ is entirely ‘blank’: although Thomas’s poem has no formal rhyme scheme, the line endings can be analysed in terms of semantic or phonetic similarities: ‘rain’ ends three lines, and ‘die’, ‘dead’, and ‘death’ complete three further lines; ‘sympathy’ distantly rhymes with ‘me’ nine lines earlier, while elsewhere ‘awake’ and ‘rain’ rub assonantly up against each other, as do ‘reeds’ and ‘dead’.

The freedom of the line endings and the blank verse allow Thomas to convey the sprawling nature of his meditations and the wildness of the rain, while the echoes and ‘rhymes’ (of a sort) at the end of certain lines suggest the limits of that worldview: he cannot embrace a wholly Romantic view of nature as one that provides solace and hope of renewal (as we often find in, say, Wordsworth).

Indeed, Edward Thomas is often considered a belated Romantic (as were many of the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century, with whom Thomas is sometimes associated), and ‘Rain’ contains many elements of Romanticism, harking back to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others: the individual poet in a solitary environment, meditating on life and death and his own place in the universe, with such meditations often being inspired by the weather, elements, and natural world around him (here, embodied by the rain, of course).

Yet there is no transcendent experience in ‘Rain’, only the hope of it in the future: death ‘[c]annot, the tempest tells me, disappoint’. But we will have to wait and see.

‘Rain’ as war poetry

‘Rain’ is one of Edward Thomas’s best-loved poems, and offers a subtler view of the war than that offered by either the patriarchal Rupert Brooke (notably in ‘The Soldier’) or Wilfred Owen (in, for instance, ‘Futility’).

But as our analysis of ‘Rain’ has attempted to show, Thomas manages to write a Romantic war poem that doesn’t romanticise the war itself. How pessimistic is this poem, and how celebratory? It partly its subtle ambiguity which makes ‘Rain’ such a fine poem.