John Gould Fletcher. Rain. Harriet Monroe, ed. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912-22

Verse > Anthologies > Harriet Monroe, ed. > Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1912–22

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Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.

Rain

By John Gould Fletcher


RAIN, rain, in the night, in the day, nothing but rain:
Rain weaving evenly
Its mantle of shadow,
Rain resting tenderly
On the dead grey corpse of the earth;	5
Rain whipping desperately
The broken rocks and the blown sea-coast;
Rain traveling high,
With great waving banners of black,
Over the upland fields.	10

Rain, rain, in the night, in the day, dark rolling rain:
The grasses are full of it,
The wet bracken shivers;
The thistle-stalks, purple,
Are gleaming with pale drops.	15
The roads and the gullies
Are filled with deep pools of it;
It smites at the lake’s face,
And the face of the lake smites back.

Rain, rain, in the night, in the day, long hissing rain:	20
The bird-flocks skim desperately
Across the grey marshes
To ’scape from its coming;
The sea surges harsh
At its white bar of sand.	25
Roaring and reeling,
It mounts from the ocean
To strike at the earth,
To fill all the world
With the sorrow of autumn,	30
The falling of leaves,
The flight of the wild birds,
The creaking of wagons, laden with harvest,
Across the dim plain.

I have woven a garment of sorrows	35
Out of its falling;
A long loose garment of grey and shimmering sorrows
Shot with strange shadows and old.
All men will shake in their houses
As I walk in the wake of the rain-cloud,	40
Fluttering my gleaming garment,
And singing a song that was taught me
By the gulls screaming long with harsh voices
To the dark clouds piled in the west off their coast;
That they may come hurrying	45
To bury the summer, the last of the year,
With the wind whipping through them,
Twisting and lashing
The long, monotonous, dreary, unchanging, dark folds of the rain.

CONTENTS · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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