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;

Rain whipping desperately

The broken rocks and the blown sea-coast;

Rain traveling high,

With great waving banners of black,

Over the upland fields.

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.

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:

The bird-flocks skim desperately

Across the grey marshes

To ’scape from its coming;

The sea surges harsh

At its white bar of sand.

Roaring and reeling,

It mounts from the ocean

To strike at the earth,

To fill all the world

With the sorrow of autumn,

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

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,

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

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.

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