The Voice of the Rain

In Walt Whitman's poem 'The Voice of the Rain', the poet asks the soft-falling shower, 'Who art thou?' And, strange to tell, the rain answers. The poem is a conversation between the poet and the rain.

The rain calls itself 'the Poem of Earth'. It rises, unseen, from the land and the bottomless sea, up to the sky. There, it takes a vague new form, altogether changed, and yet the same. Then it comes down again to the earth.

It falls to wash the dry, dusty land, and it wakes the seeds that, without it, would stay latent (hidden) and unborn. Day and night, it gives back life to its own origin, the earth, and makes it pure and beautiful.

The last two lines are in brackets, because they are the poet's own comment, comparing the rain to a song. A song, too, goes out from its birthplace (the poet's heart), wanders among people, whether they notice it or not, and finally returns to its creator with love.

Behind the poem is the water cycle: evaporation, condensation and rain, seen not as science but as poetry.