CBSE Class 11 Annual Assessment

Chapter 3: The Voice of the Rain

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Summary

Walt Whitman's poem is a brief dialogue between the poet and the rain, which is personified and given a voice. The poet asks the soft-falling shower who it is, and, strange to tell, the rain answers — its reply being given as if translated. The rain calls itself "the Poem of Earth," describing how it rises eternal and impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea, ascends to heaven, where it is vaguely formed and "altogether changed, and yet the same," and then descends to wash the droughts, tiny particles and dust-layers of the globe. It explains that without this rain, all that lies in the earth would remain mere seeds, latent and unborn; by day and night the rain gives back life to its own origin and makes the earth pure and beautiful. This describes the natural water cycle of evaporation, condensation and precipitation, which the poet links with science. The closing lines, set in brackets, draw a parallel between rain and song (or poetry): a song too issues from its birthplace, wanders out into the world whether noticed or not, and duly returns with love to its source. The poem thus celebrates rain as a life-giving, selfless, eternal force and likens the cyclic journey of rain to the journey of art.

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