Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The Rain by Robert Creeley-response

I found “The Rain” by Robert Creeley to be a poem that demonstrated excellent c raft and metaphor. It is not a lengthy piece, which allows the message to be strong and concise. I felt that Creeley uses rain to symbolize the outside world we have to prove ourselves to. Just as life become a daily routine of school, work, eating, socializing, and so forth, it is easy to compare it to the endless beating of rain. We cannot stop the rain just as we cannot stop our conscious from overflowing with thought some times. The poem uses a lot repetition which builds upon the theme of an incessantly rainy setting. Words fall just a drops would onto a windowsill. There are breaks placed within the poem that give certain lines a stronger meaning. For instance, in the fifth stanza he separates “the getting out” from a completely different stanza that begins with “of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi lust of intentional indifference.” “The getting out” seems to hang for a moment, allowing the reader to fully feel the weight of his longing to understand and embrace the rain. Alliteration is also used frequently in this piece, which again adds to the rhythmic quality of the rain he is referring to. Finally, Creeley writes “be wet with a decent happiness.” I feel he is saying that although life, the rain, can be redundant and persistent, one must fully indulge in it rather than be too afraid to walk into it. I enjoyed reading this piece and I found it to have great depth.

1 comment:

  1. Poignant analysis. The line "be wet with a decent happiness." stuck out at me as well. At first I was imagining this sentence as a state of mind. The kind you get when you finally drink water after being dehydrated. But it also reminded me of a corny refrigerator magnet I saw one time. It said something like, "Don't try to find shelter from the storm, learn to dance in the rain."

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