Rain streams across a hotel window and breaks the street outside into a rippling impressionist geometry.
Rain on a window unfailingly triggers in my bed the recitation of a single stanza from a poem, in a classroom forty nine years ago.
The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain.
The poem is Longfellow's How beautiful is the rain! and this is the fourth stanza of eleven.
Curious that an eleven year old should have felt such empathic pull from an image and an idea that meant nothing to him from his own experience ... and continue to feel it as a permanent and consistent association across the next five decades. I would have expected the opening line pairs from stanzas two and three to be the ones that stuck, because they are instantly recognisable – and stanza three ties very specifically to the visual image which I associate the poem:
How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoof
... ... ...
Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
But the mind is its own master, and stanza four is what has stayed with me across the gulf between then and now.
(Possibly the fact that I learnt the poem in the classroom of the monstrous Mrs F has something to do with it. Mrs F was the class teacher from hell – literally, perhaps, to judge by her constant warnings of fire and torment in the afterlife. Maybe I sat in the whiff of sulphur and brimstone, imagining the release of cool rain? But no ... I suspect that this is a fancy constructed well after the event, a poetic rationalisation of the past from a psychologically aware adult future.)
The whole poem, to be honest, has little appeal for me as an adult ... I left it behind about five years after I first heard it ... but that single stanza remains mnemonically wedded to sight of rain flowing down window glass.
If you want the whole Longfellow poem...
