Rain

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.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight 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,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me,
disappoint.

--Edward Thomas, January 7, 1916.

One of my writing teachers once presented this as her favorite poem. She asked my class if we could guess which line she found the most beautiful. People guessed for awhile before she gave her answer: line seven.

I'm not sure what my favorite line is, but I do agree that this one is particularly nice. It has a nice, steady and repeating-but-shifting rhythm that is present but not strongly insistent. (One could liken this to the rhythm of rain on a roof.) The stress pattern slows down at the end to emphasize rain, an effect that piles on top of the repetitions of the word throughout the poem.

The succession of sounds is almost musical, and very lulling. The line moves through a wide variety of vowel sounds, as well as numerous soft consonants. (The only really hard consonant present is the 't' at the end of 'that'.) One- and two-syllable words mean that the rhythm is easier to control, and help the smoothness of pronunciation. Nothing sticks in the mouth; sounds simply flow out in a sort of steady, ethereal way.

Contrast with some of Seamus Heaney's verse:

Between my finger and my thumb
the squat pen rests, snug as a gun.

Short words, but a different rhythm, especially in the second line--squat pen rests--and different vowel and consonant combinations that make the mouth do more work to say the words. Which means that they feel more physical, more solid. And more appropriate to Heaney's poem, which juxtaposes his work as a writer with the digging and farming work done by his father and grandfather.