Longfellow S Forecast: Rain Today, Sun Tomorrow

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Longfellow’s Forecast: Rain Today, Sun Tomorrow

By Emma Sinclair

What is life? For most people, life is neither a series of all good events nor a series of all bad events. In “The Rainy Day,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow looks at these two opposing sides of life, the positive and the negative, and concludes that both are necessary. The poem’s theme is that since all human lives contain both sadness and joy, true contentment comes from understanding and accepting this fact.

From the very first lines of the poem, the speaker’s gloom is plain to see. “The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary,” the speaker says. The imagery of cold, darkness, and rain creates a mood of extreme unhappiness. Although the wind is “never weary,” the speaker, in contrast, sounds weary—weary of life. Everything he looks at reminds him of his despair. He is looking at a “moldering wall” to which a vine clings. The word moldering suggests decay and death. The leaves that fall “at every gust” in line 4 also evoke the idea of life’s ending. At the end of the first stanza,the speaker repeats the observation that “the day is dark and dreary.” Longfellow’s use of repetition emphasizes the darkness and dreariness still further. It is as if the speaker can’t get the darkness and dreariness out of his mind.

Even more repetition appears in the second stanza, and this repetition again emphasizes the sadness and gloom that the speaker feels. In fact, the first, second, and fifth lines of the first stanza are repeated almost exactly in the second stanza. This stanza describes more rain, more darkness, more “never weary” wind. However, the second stanza also gives the reader some new information. For the first time, the reader is given a glimpse of why the speaker is sad, although it is a vague glimpse. He is sad because he is no longer young, and rather than living in the present or looking forward to the future, he keeps dwelling uselessly on bygone times. He admits this problem in line 8, in which his “thoughts still cling to the moldering Past.” This clinging matches line 3 in the previous stanza, where the vine clings to the “moldering wall.” Similarly, in line 9, the speaker’s youthful hopes “fall thick in the blast.” This matches line 4 in the previous stanza, where the leaves fall in the wind. So the vine is like the speaker’s thoughts, and the falling leaves are like his hopes. The image of the vine-covered wall symbolizes the speaker’s life. His youth is passing, his hopes are fading, and he cannot keep from thinking about the past.

At this point in the poem, the reader might think that the speaker is hopelessly depressed. However, at that very moment, at the beginning of the third stanza, Longfellow switches moods suddenly. For an unexplained reason, the speaker finds the inner strength to face life. He tells his negative thoughts to “Be still” (11). Even though the weather in the poem does not actually change, the speaker reminds himself that “Behind the clouds the sun is still shining” (12). Then, in the poem’s final three lines, the poem expresses the idea that happiness and unhappiness come and go in human life like the weather. “Into each life some rain must fall,” line 14 says. The rain symbolizes sadness. Just as rain falls on everyone, unhappiness comes to everyone at times. The speaker realizes that happiness and unhappiness are both part of what makes everyone human. “Some days must be dark and dreary,” he concludes in the poem’s last line. That little word “some” marks an important change from the previous stanza, which said, “And the days are dark and dreary.” Some days are dark and dreary, not all. And if only some days are dark and dreary, some must be sunny and clear. Now that he understands this simple, universal fact, the speaker is cheerful again even though it is still a rainy day.

In the end, Longfellow’s poem is one of hope, despite two stanzas that are filled with imagery of darkness, dreariness, and gloom. The poem starts out as a description of deep sadness, but it turns out to be a poem about how sadness and joy alternate in human life. It is “the common fate of all,” as line 13 says, to experience both good and bad. When you are sad, remember that everyone is sometimes sad; be patient and wait for the clouds to part and the sun to shine. That is Longfellow’s hopeful message to his readers.