Rain Before Dawn (Poem Review)

Rain Before Dawn

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE dull, faint patter in the drooping hours
Drifts in upon my sleep and fills my hair
With damp; the burden of the heavy air
Is strewn upon me where my tired soul cowers,
Shrinking like some lone queen in empty towers
Dying. Blind with unrest I grow aware:
The pounding of broad wings drifts down the stair
And sates me like the heavy scent of flowers.
 
I lie upon my heart. My eyes like hands
Grip at the soggy pillow. Now the dawn
Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse
Of night; lead-eyed and moist she straggles o’er the lawn,
Between the curtains brooding stares and stands
Like some drenched swimmer — Death’s within the house!

_______________________________________

Fitzgerald’s heavy, melancholy poem is comprised of 14 lines. The first stanza (8 lines) has a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA and he second (six lines) is CDEDCE. There is no set meter, however, most of the lines are near to iambic pentameter.

The first stanza begins in a bit of a confusing way, however, the picture we are presented with is a person lying alone, at night, in the rain, and said rain is making his/her hair wet. This might draw one to the conclusion that the subject of the piece is lying down for sleep… outside. Why be outside? The tone leads us to conclude he is deceased, lying in a coffin. That conclusion is not changed by the rest of the first stanza. A pounding of broad wings likely refers to the sound that might be made by a coffin being drenched by rain water – we already know water is leaking inside and wetting the subject’s hair. However, the imagery might evoke a literal angel, or it might refer to a tombstone made to look like an angel. The description of flowers also evokes a recent funeral scene, too.

The second stanza is more of the same. We imagine a body lying in a cemetery upon which it is raining. In Line 12, we are told that dawn “straggles o’er the lawn” but we are not told which lawn. The imagery though is well-suited to being that of a graveyard lawn. The final words of the poem also speak to this more directly: “Death’s within the house!”

The most enigmatic line of the poem, in my opinion, is the following:

I lie upon my heart. My eyes like hands
Grip at the soggy pillow.

Is Fitzgerald describing a body in some state of decay?

One interesting metaphor from the poem is that the night is a mourning woman, grieving the subject’s death. The choice is interesting, to me, because it adds to the weight of the subject’s loneliness. Rather that be mourned by a real woman, he is mourned instead by nature. There is a feeling of having been forgotten, already, even while the scent of flowers remains hanging in the air.

I enjoy the clever imagery with which Fitzgerald writes, even if the whole thing also feels macabre in an extreme. There’s something horrifying about the idea that we might be present in our coffins, aware, after we pass away. Horror aside, this also seems like the sort of poem that might be a favorite of someone who hangs around in graveyards for fun.