Stop Making Sense

A look at James Wright's poem "Rain."

On this dark, rainy day, I’m reminded of a favorite poem by James Wright, “Rain.”  It is one of his very short poems grounded in his love of ancient, Chinese poetry, where he abandons rhyme and standard poetic structures to focus instead on establishing a tonal mood, using the language of poetry to reach toward and attempt to express a complex emotion: 

Rain

It is the sinking of things.

Flashlights drift over dark trees,
Girls kneel,
An owl’s eyelids fall.

The sad bones of my hands descend into a valley 
Of strange rocks. 

I love how the poem forges its emotion from new, unexpected language right from the outset—defining/describing rain as, oddly, “the sinking of things.”  This initial gesture establishes that Wright is going deeper right from the start into the emotive center of what rain means to him.  “The sinking of things” is so vague, so imprecise, something logically incoherent yet emotionally graspable.  What “things” are “sinking”?  What is meant by “sinking” here?  Immediately we are thrown off balance; still, we can tell that something is being communicated, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense.

After this poetic overview/definition of the rain, we are only given a series of images to help bolster what is being expressed. Each image extends, deepens and complicates this wholly emotional response to rain. 

“Flashlights drift over dark trees”—images of urgency, fear, searching in the darkness for something, the trees themselves darkened, perhaps, by the rain.  These images could speak to the way rain shuts us in, the skies darker, the clouds hanging lower, “sinking” down onto us—the need for light…. But to try to explain it away isn’t possible.  Surely there is no univocal meaning hidden away inside it, and what it says may well be tonal only. 

“Girls kneel”—the first correlation to the rain as “the sinking of things”; these girls are in the act of kneeling, of “sinking,” getting lower, smaller.  Kneeling is also an act of contrition, a humbling gesture—to kneel before a king, queen, a god. And these are girls kneeling—naive, vulnerable, that sense of fear tinged with desperation from the first images extended, magnified. Rain somehow contains and brings out these dynamics as well, but here, too, the poem resists overt meaning, even “symbolic” meaning; again, it is a purely tonal, emotive gesture. 

“An owl’s eyelids fall”—another image of downward motion, another “sinking thing,” something quite small, and owl eyes possess a certain meaning already, to be owl-eyed is to have good vision and even keen insight, to “know,” to be wise.  Does the falling rain also bring about even the “sinking” of knowledge, a lack of sight, of insight?  For James Wright, does the sadness brought on by rainy days also somehow arrest one’s sight, making the task of gaining knowledge all the more difficult? 

“The sad bones of my hands descend into a valley/Of strange rocks.”—these last lines are for me the most elusive, since, while the imagery is clear, the juxtaposition of the images is so odd and, again, unexpected.  We find three images here,  “sad bones of my hands,” “a valley,” and “strange rocks.”  The verb “descend” certainly fits with the motif of things “sinking,” though this is different than the kneeling girls, the falling eyelids of the owl.  While we are given things to see, we are also forced to find a way to see them.  Do we envision the poet’s disembodied, “sad” hand bones falling downward into this strange valley—his sadness so deep that it “sinks” right down to the bone?  Or, do we think of the bones primarily as the hands of the poet who is himself descending into the valley, his hands (and hence the bones of his hands) inescapably along for the ride?  Or do we somehow manage to see both of these things at once—and perhaps others?  For me the line continues to evoke a tonal aura, one of sadness, isolation, estrangement.  I also think of hands as the things we use to touch, to possess, to hold, to grasp—all of these words having multiple meanings—and so one’s ability to do all of this has also somehow come undone and is descending into this low place whose only feature seems to be its unwelcoming, hard “strange rocks” —the poet, or at least the sad bones of his hands, brought here by the rain.  

As I woke to the steadily descending raindrops, felt the heavy, unexpected, oddly warm air, turned on a desk lamp I usually leave off in the daytime, felt an emotion well up inside me, and this poem came to mind, I realized I needed it to help me unravel the emotions I was feeling, to give voice to something inexpressible—which it did, though I can still only read/speak the poem to fully say what it told me. Perhaps more than anything it reminded me of the limitations of ordinary, logic-based language, the need for expressions like this short poem that don’t “make sense” but somehow allow us to make sense of ourselves.  

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Use my affiliate link to purchase James Wright’s collected poems, a wonderful selection of his work, and the one I turn to frequently. I will receive a small commission, and Bookshop.org supports small, independent booksellers.

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