Shivpreet Singh

I was thinking of rain while practicing the melodic scale of rain, Raag Megh Malhar, and thought to look up what one of my favorite poets had to say about rain and found this beautiful poem: The voice of the rain. Here is the poem followed by my observations on it.

THE VOICE OF THE RAIN.
Walt Whitman

And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form'd, altogether changed,
and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own
origin, and make pure and beautify it;
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wander-
ing,
Reck'd or unreck'd. duly with love returns.)

A few observations on this poem:

Rain has never talked to the listener of the poem. It doesn't talk to everyone apparently. In this poem, Walt Whitman asks a question of the rain (Who are you?) and surprisingly, the rain responds. It was a private discussion between Walt and the rain, so he kindly translates for us, the rain-deaf.
What a beautiful way to describe rain: it is the poem of the earth. Indeed, a poem is what gives life to the world as we know it. A spiritual poem, a guru, gives life to its reciter, its student. If there were no Guru, there would be no enlightenment and thereby no life. Just like if there were no rain, there would be no fresh water, and there would be no life as we know it. Rain gives earth life, literally. So it is indeed the poem of the earth.
Walt then describes the nature of water: unending, perhaps a poem that is repeated ad infinitum. Water rises from lands and oceans and goes into the sky, and then condenses in the form of rain. In the process it does three things: (1) it gives life back to itself (it can evaporate and condense again), (2) it purifies and cleans everything it touches, and (3) it beautifies it.

[updated 2020]

Reminds me of Akhaan Jeevan - as long as I say, I live; as soon as I forget I die. Poetry and their songs are essential to life. "I am not an essential service." says Jane Hirshfield in her poem during the pandemic. I bet Walt Whitman would differ. The poet is the most essential, perhaps only lesser than her poem, Today when I could do nothing.

A Drop fell on the Apple Tree -
Another - on the Roof -
A Half a Dozen kissed the Eaves -
And made the Gables laugh -

A few went out to help the Brook
That went to help the Sea -
Myself Conjectured were they Pearls -
What Necklaces could be -

The Dust replaced, in Hoisted Roads -
The Birds jocoser sung -
The Sunshine threw his Hat away -
The Bushes - spangles flung -

The Breezes brought dejected Lutes -
And bathed them in the Glee -
The Orient showed a single Flag,
And signed the fête away -

Wonder as a Form of Prayer at Walden

This morning the path along Walden is the color of pewter. The cattails wear a dull sheen, and the pond holds its breath in a single, slate-blue syllable. It isn’t summer, not quite; the light has already begun its slow withdrawal, like a guest who lingers at the door with one hand on the knob. And still—perhaps because of that quiet—Emily Dickinson arrives. I hear her small procession of raindrops: “A Drop fell on the Apple Tree— / Another—on the Roof—,” and with them the house breaking into laughter, the eaves kissed awake, the world briefly decked in “spangles.”

Dickinson’s great gift is to show us that the ordinary is crowded with ceremony. In her poem, the weather throws a fête for itself. Each drop is a guest; the sunshine tosses his hat when the party ends; somewhere a rainbow (that “single Flag”) lifts and lowers to close the day. She teaches a discipline of seeing that is not separate from devotion. Wonder is not what follows prayer. Wonder is prayer: the mind kneeling without kneeling, the eyes bowing without closing.

As I walk, I find myself testing her vision against this shore. The birch leaves tremble like a quiet applause. A ring spirals from a trout’s quick kiss on the surface. The railroad hum stitches itself into the trees. Nothing spectacular, yet everything felt. Dickinson would ask for nothing more. She doesn’t climb the peaks; she watches from a window in Amherst and, by attending, turns a shower into a cosmos. “A few went out to help the Brook / That went to help the Sea—.” The smallest act belongs to the largest story. In our age of performance, this is a radical sentence: to help is to become part of a current already moving toward the whole.

Mary Oliver, another New England watcher of ponds and fields, once confessed, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention.” That is Dickinson’s catechism too. Attention is what threads the pearls into “Necklaces”—what takes the separate “drops” of a day and strings them until they shine. Here at Walden, Thoreau’s old plea to “live deliberately” becomes less an ethic than an act of seeing: let the world arrive, then answer with your gaze. When Oliver kneels in the grass to ask what she was made to do, she is not asking for a program. She is asking for sight.

Gerard Manley Hopkins called it “shining from shook foil,” that sudden flare in which the world reveals its charged interior. Dickinson names the same flare with smaller lanterns: laughter in the gables, jocose birds, sun tossing his hat. Walden is a good tutor for this. The pond doesn’t perform. It repeats itself—ripples, reeds, soft weather—and in that repetition gives you back your breath. Wonder is not the rare fireworks; it is the daily glimmer that keeps the soul watered.

If wonder is prayer, then practice looks like this: you walk and let the world come forward a half step. You don’t press your meanings on it. You let a cattail be a cattail. You let the wind write its passing in the sedges and accept that you will never learn the alphabet it uses. You watch the light and consent to its leaving. A rainbow raises and lowers its flag without waiting for your camera. The fête signs itself away. Prayer is the willingness to let the party end and to be grateful for the invitation you didn’t earn.

The moral horizon of Dickinson’s poem is modest yet clear: everything belongs to everything. The drop joins the brook, the brook the sea; dust settles; birds find a joke in their own throats; the bushes fling sequins so that nothing goes unadorned. If there is a wisdom for living here, it is a wisdom of participation. To wonder is to join. To notice is to help. The eye becomes a small brook running toward a larger water.

Which is why this walk can matter beyond mood. When wonder ripens into prayer, the self is less a fortress and more a window. Judgment loosens. Usefulness takes gentler forms. You start to suspect that the world has always been doing the work and your part is to keep your attention clear enough not to interrupt. Even grief, in that light, is a kind of rain—the cloud emptying so that the field can be seeded again.

Guru Nanak sings of just such weather for the inner life: a rain that soaks the mind until it is drenched through, the Name falling in sheets, the parched ground of the heart turned dark with blessing. Dickinson’s pearls, Oliver’s attention, Hopkins’s shining, Thoreau’s deliberation—all are ways of calling for that downpour. We walk the shore, we look, we let the world speak; and somewhere beyond the trees a single flag lifts, then lowers. The fête has ended, but the mind stands wet with it still—shimmering, rinsed, and quietly praying by seeing.

THE VOICE OF THE RAIN.

Wonder as a Form of Prayer at Walden

SHIVPREET SINGH

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