This is Episode 25 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is “Rain” by Edward Thomas.

You can read the poem here.

TS Eliot once said that poetry communicates before it’s understood. I encourage you, with every poem on this podcast, to let it speak to you how it speaks. However it lands for you, let it land.

The poem may seem at first reading to be excessively downbeat—about solitude, about suffering, about the dissolution of love, the inevitability of death. 

If that comes across, it’s perhaps understandable—Thomas wrote it while training to go to France with the British Army during World War I, where he was killed in action at the Battle of Arras at Easter 1917. Still, there is some tone of hopefulness within the bleakness, a hope that encourages us to embrace everything about life, including death itself.

Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com