Try This Rain Meditation For Spring Showers

By Lucy Cheseldine

When I think of New York, I think of rain. It’s chasing a year since I spent time in the city working at The New York City Poetry Festival and still my freshest memories are of falling water. I can smell the dank subway on my way home from Central Park’s deep puddles; from a deli doorway on a quiet street I watched the city sink. Rain feels right in isolation. It isolates. It pushes us inside and keeps us in rooms with its sudden showers. Or it sets us to daily tasks with taps that sound out the rhythm of steady work. Rain is homemaker and caretaker. It prompts conversation. I remember speaking with a doorman who recommended over and over his mother’s Cajun cooking as if, when the rain stopped, we might celebrate together with dinner. Rain is ceremony and birth: it washes out and cleans corners. To rain we open our mouths in the hope of its blessing, forming words as we go. But rain silences too with its war-like pelting, scattering the city to shelter. Rain leaves no people out, showering without discrimination, but it shows who we’ve left out from the safety of high windows by soaking the discriminated. It can be an angry divinity. Rain is like lock down; rain is like illness; rain is like life. Rain is Spring’s never timelier gift. 

It’s little wonder that so many poets have taken rain as their subject. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “Song for a Rainy Season”, rain is a collector of images to “the ordinary brown/owl” and “fat frogs”. Its drops of water domesticate and summon a democracy of the forest:

House, open house
to the white dewa
nd the milk-white sunrise
kind to the eyes,
to membership
of silver fish, mouse,
bookworms,
big moths; with a wall
for the mildew's
ignorant map;

This house, “beneath the magnetic rock/rain,/rainbow-ridden”, opens onto the world. Her quaint lyric is “rainy”, harmless and intermittent, and its various intruders are most welcome. But only for a time, “For later/era will differ”. The world will move one, leaving us behind, “no longer wearing rainbows or rain” as “waterfalls shrivel/in the steady sun”. Our place here is temporary. Today, in our closed houses, such knowledge feels close. For Bishop too, knowledge is like water. As she tells us is in “At The Fishouses” it is “historical, flowing, flown”. Rain and its element can make a slippery case for existence. 

For Wallace Stevens rain is also a passing in his poem “Sunday Morning”:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; 
All pleasures and all pains, remembering 
The bough of summer and the winter branch. 
These are the measures destined for her soul. 

 Unlike Bishop’s porous house, there’s an integrity to Stevens’s “passions”. Rain is a necessary release, pulling our internal life towards lived experience. It’s hard to find these moments confined to the high-rise flats and human tracks we’ve made of our cities. But perhaps now is as good a time as any to ask how we’ve been measuring what’s “destined for” our souls. Another comfort I take from this poem, at a time of potential boredom, is the unstoppable nature of human drama. While these fits of feeling can be trying and difficult, I think Stevens knew too that in another sense our inner life provides the most constant and vital form of activity, even entertainment.  Much like the rain. Or as William Carols Williams writes “so much depends/upon/a red wheel barrow/glazed with rain water”. Like his language, so much depends on our material banalities being a passage to grasping what we can’t touch.

During the pandemic, as I sit inside watching the world through drips and drops, I have the uncanny feeling that instead the world is watching me. The empty streets ask questions and the trees want answers. Or they don’t. Their vacant stares are I-told-you-so. At a time of uncertainty and vigilance, I turn to Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” to think about what we need to leave behind, who we should watch out for with greater care, and who we should stop watching. His rain is elsewhere but it is going to fall, and when it does, the hope is change:

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   
And someone running up to bowl—and none   
Thought of the others they would never meet   
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   
I thought of London spread out in the sun,   
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   
Travelling coincidence; and what it held   
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.