A good rain

Tuesday, that hang-over of Monday weekdays, whipped in early this morning with a very definite presence of its own, all mighty winds and driven rain. There was water standing over the roadway in places where I have never seen it standing before, and the force of the rain hitting the canvas roof over my little car was palpable, even when standing still before an uncooperative traffic light. I suspect that walking to and from main campus later this morning, even with my rain jacket and silly looking wide-brimmed hat, I will get very wet.

And yet, if I can be allowed the liberty of starting a sentence with a conjunction (a bridge between related thoughts), I do love a good rain. Rain that comes down like this speaks of external forces larger than us, drives a primal disquiet (literally) before it that washes over me as surely as the literal rain drops, and pushes me toward small dry spaces. This kind of work/excursion-ending rain storm calls us to a chair, a small circle of light in a dry protected space, and our thoughts, or a good book, or... .  Or a desk in an office, with a small task lamp and the glow of an iPad's screen.

Great poets like Mother Goose have been inspired by a good rain:

It’s raining, it’s pouring

The old man’s snoring.

He got into bed 

And bumped his head 

And couldn’t get up in the morning.

Or, there is always the ever-romantic Shelley:

The fitful alternations of the rain,

When the chill wind, languid as with pain

Of its own heavy moisture, here and there

Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

Songwriter Bruce Cockburn, in one of his songs, uses a richly visual description of cloud cover that frequently comes to mind: "The clouds were squatting so close over us tonight you'd think they were trying to hatch us."


One poem about rain that really captures the nuanced layers of a good wetting storm, even though it comes from a summer, rather than fall-into-winter context, is Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain by Delmore Schwartz.  It begins:

A tattering of rain and then the reign

Of pour and pouring-down and down,

Where in the westward gathered the filming gown

Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane

Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain,

Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,

Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!

And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:

A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,

A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.

In the second stanza Schwartz turns the phrase, "Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar."  That was what it sounded like on today's drive in, with the rain slapping the canvas soft top like shot pellets, the non-stop slush of water forceably cleaved by tires, the wipers snicking back and forth, and the rattling grunt of a diesel truck's engine somewhere behind my rooster tail of sprayed water.


Music from a severely spare, grey, wet landscape seemed appropriate, so Sigur Rós, cranked up loud enough to be heard above the rain-induced roar of commuting noises, kept me company for the drive in. Specifically, tracks from their wonderful new live concert release, Inni. 


Good stuff.