Rain
by Edward Thomas
English poet. He made his living by writing commissioned books, many of which were about English country life. He also wrote biographies and criticism, including a life of the writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies, whom he much admired, and studies of Swinburne (1909) and Walter Pater (1913). The poems for which he is famous were written during the First World War; they appeared in Six Poems (1916), Poems (1917) and Collected Poems (1920).
Rain
by Edward Thomas
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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 to-night 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.
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