Poem-a-Day - "Rain Fugue" by Jessie Redmon Fauset

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March 19, 2023

Rain Fugue

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Slanting, driving, Summer rain
How you wash my heart of pain!
How you make me think of trees,
Ships and gulls and flashing seas!
In your furious, tearing wind,
Swells a chant that heals my mind;
And your passion high and proud,
Makes me shout and laugh aloud!

Autumn rains that start at dawn,
“Dropping veils of thinnest lawn,”
Soaking sod between dank grasses,
Sweeping golden leaves in masses,—
Blotting, blurring out the Past,
In a dream you hold me fast;
Calling, coaxing to forget
Things that are, for things not yet.

Winter tempest, winter rain,
Hurtling down with might and main,
You but make me hug my hearth,
Laughing, sheltered from your wrath.
Now I woo my dancing fire,
Piling, piling drift-wood higher.
Books and friends and pictures old,
Hearten while you pound and scold!

Pattering, wistful showers of Spring
Set me to remembering
Far-off times and lovers too,
Gentle joys and heart-break rue,—
Memories I’d as lief forget,
Were not oblivion sadder yet.
Ah! you twist my mind with pain,
Wistful, whispering April rain!

Summer, Autumn, Winter rain,
How you ease my heart of pain!
Whispering, wistful showers of Spring,
How I love the hurt you bring!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 19, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Rain Fugue” appeared in The Crisis, vol. 28, no. 4 (August, 1924). In Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (Oxford University Press, 1999), Nina Miller, assistant professor of English at Iowa State University, writes that “the speaker allows herself to be lured by spring into contemplation of the past. The past brings ‘hurt’ that she ‘loves’—as against the pain of stanza one, which she was happy to lose. Whence the shift to pleasure in pain? The seasonal ordeal of autumn and winter has given the speaker a core self, whose boundaries are only enhanced by the look backward. Memory by definition pulls life into the orbit of a controlling consciousness. Pain under these circumstances is likewise an intensity lending itself to an even greater sense of the speaker’s emotional world as subject only to her own control and as intrinsically, autonomously meaningful.”

Jessie Redmon Fauset, born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey, was a poet, novelist, and editor from the Harlem Renaissance. She is the author of several novels, including There Is Confusion (Boni and Liveright, 1924) and Plum Bun (Matthews & Marrot, 1928). Fauset also served as the editor of The Crisis from 1919–26. She died on April 30, 1961.

The Crisis, Vol. 28
(NAACP, 1924)

“Travelling Storm” by Mark Van Doren
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“The Seasons Moralized” by Philip Freneau
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