The Rain Motif as a Force of Emotional and Existential Dissolution
The poem’s rain is persistent and indistinct: “In this rain / every day — / it’s all one and / the same.” This repetition emphasizes rain’s unrelenting nature, blurring temporal and emotional boundaries. Rain here is not a passing weather event but a continuous condition that “falls / so long / that puddles / dammed up / in my / eyes.” The image of puddles “dammed up” inside the eyes signals internalized sorrow or confusion, a liquid obstruction to vision and understanding.
This motif challenges the conventional association of rain with cleansing or emotional release. Instead, the speaker “grew / afraid / of water,” suggesting that rain has become a source of anxiety rather than comfort. The progression into madness is signaled as “the drops / of rain / go / mad / little by little,” mirroring the speaker’s own psychological unraveling.
Meaning and Interpretation: Rain as Collapse and Resistance
The rain motif encapsulates a paradoxical tension between surrender and resistance. The speaker “falls / with them” (the drops), implying a loss of control and submission to the overwhelming force. Yet the poem also records a struggle: “I don’t / agree, / I clung / to the height, / pushing apart / Gravity’s / pitchforks.” This moment reveals a refusal to succumb, an assertion of freedom against inevitable descent.
The poem personifies Freedom as a figure who “laughed, / smashed / laws,” indicating that freedom itself is chaotic and unbound, lacking “Mass.” This suggests the motif of rain is entwined with freedom’s instability—freedom here is not a stable ideal but a force that disrupts order and coherence.
The closing lines deepen the motif’s complexity: “Everything that / loves you / sooner or / later / goes / underwater, / turning / my emptiness / into your / bad weather.” Love and emptiness are submerged, transformed into “bad weather,” a metaphor for emotional turbulence and loss. Rain embodies this transformation, a medium where clarity dissolves into obscurity.
Language, Imagery, and Literary Techniques in the Rain Motif
Kakitsubata’s diction around rain favors fragmentation and repetition, reinforcing the motif’s overwhelming persistence. The sparse, stanzaic layout with short lines and enjambment mirrors the drip-by-drip accumulation of rain and psychological pressure.
A key formal device is the linebreak at “every day — / it’s all one and / the same,” where the dash and break interrupt the flow, forcing a pause that reflects the numbing repetition of the rain’s presence. This break isolates “every day” and “it’s all one and,” emphasizing the monotony and blurring of days.
Personification of abstract concepts—Freedom who “laughed, / smashed / laws” and “tangling whole / classes in the / machine / code”—introduces a surreal dimension, linking rain to forces beyond natural weather, to systemic and existential disorder.
The metaphor of “Gravity’s / pitchforks” is striking, combining an elemental force with an aggressive image, suggesting the speaker’s resistance is both physical and psychological.
Form and Structure: Linebreaks and Fragmentation Reflecting the Rain’s Effects
The poem’s fragmented structure, with isolated words and short lines, mimics the disjointed experience of being caught in relentless rain. The frequent enjambment destabilizes rhythm, evoking the unpredictable fall of raindrops and the speaker’s fractured consciousness.
The middot-like pauses (linebreaks) create micro-moments of hesitation and emphasis, particularly in the opening stanza, where “every day — / it’s all one and / the same” uses a dash to fracture the phrase, mirroring the poem’s thematic insistence on sameness that nonetheless resists full acceptance.
This structural fragmentation enacts the poem’s thematic tension between surrender and resistance, freedom and gravity.
Tone, Voice, and Perspective: Ambiguity Between Agency and Surrender
The speaker’s voice fluctuates between passive submission (“I fall / with them”) and active defiance (“I don’t / agree, / I clung / to the height”). This oscillation creates an ambiguous tone, neither fully resigned nor triumphant.
The personification of Freedom as a laughing, law-smashing figure adds a sardonic edge, suggesting both mockery and liberation. The speaker’s fear of water (“I grew / afraid / of water”) contrasts with this chaotic freedom, revealing a conflicted psyche caught between desiring control and being overwhelmed.
Contextualizing Rain Across Kakitsubata’s Corpus
The rain motif recurs in other poems from the Kakitsubata corpus, often intertwined with themes of cold, solitude, and emotional turbulence. For example, “Rain falls inside the fridge. Puddles are scattered all over the flat. I decided you won’t find me among them” Rain falls inside the fridge. Puddles are scattered all over the flat. I decided you won't find me among them uses rain to symbolize internal stagnation and frozen emotional states.
In “Morning. Coffee. A hangover in the rain makes an umbrella useless.” Morning. Coffee. A hangover in the rain makes an umbrella useless, rain signifies a disconnection from normalcy and a blurring of the self within a foreign or alien context.
These intertextual echoes reinforce rain as a motif of emotional and existential dislocation rather than mere weather.
Alternative Interpretations of the Rain Motif
While the dominant reading sees rain as a force of dissolution and madness, an alternative interpretation might view rain as a metaphor for transformation or rebirth—though one that is difficult and painful. The speaker’s fear of water and descent could be a necessary confrontation with internal chaos before renewal.
Alternatively, rain could represent the inescapability of emotional pain, a shared “bad weather” that connects the speaker’s emptiness with the external world’s turbulence.
Critical Review: The Rain Motif’s Role in Challenging Clarity and Stability
The poem’s rain motif is effective in destabilizing conventional emotional symbolism. By refusing to allow rain to be merely cleansing or sorrowful, Kakitsubata complicates the reader’s expectations, making rain a site of ongoing conflict between freedom and surrender.
The poem’s structural fragmentation and precise diction enhance this effect, making the motif visceral and unsettling. However, the poem’s abstraction and surreal personifications may challenge some readers seeking narrative clarity.
Overall, the rain motif stands as a central device that unifies the poem’s exploration of emotional disintegration, resistance, and the elusive nature of freedom.
Conclusion
In “In this rain every day — it’s all one and,” Andrey Kakitsubata transforms the rain motif into a complex symbol of existential flux. Rain is neither cleansing nor purely melancholic but a persistent force that erodes boundaries and challenges the speaker’s grasp on freedom and sanity. The poem’s language, form, and tone all work in concert to present rain as a metaphor for the relentless, often maddening conditions of emotional and existential experience.