The Full Text of “Like Rain it sounded till it curved”
1Like Rain it sounded till it curved
2And then I knew 'twas Wind—
3It walked as wet as any Wave
4But swept as dry as sand—
5When it had pushed itself away
6To some remotest Plain
7A coming as of Hosts was heard
8That was indeed the rain—
9It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
10It warbled in the Road—
11It pulled the spigot from the Hills
12And let the Floods abroad—
13It loosened acres, lifted seas
14The sites of Centres stirred
15Then like Elijah rode away
16Upon a Wheel of Cloud.
The Full Text of “Like Rain it sounded till it curved”
1Like Rain it sounded till it curved
2And then I knew 'twas Wind—
3It walked as wet as any Wave
4But swept as dry as sand—
5When it had pushed itself away
6To some remotest Plain
7A coming as of Hosts was heard
8That was indeed the rain—
9It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
10It warbled in the Road—
11It pulled the spigot from the Hills
12And let the Floods abroad—
13It loosened acres, lifted seas
14The sites of Centres stirred
15Then like Elijah rode away
16Upon a Wheel of Cloud.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Introduction
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In Emily Dickinson's "Like Rain it sounded till it curved," a huge rainstorm unsettles a whole landscape, sometimes playfully, sometimes chaotically. A storm, the poem suggests, can feel world-altering—and so too, perhaps, can a symbolic inner storm of thought or feeling. Like most of Dickinson's work, this poem didn't appear in print until many years after her death; this one only appeared in 1945, in the posthumous collection Bolts of Melody.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Summary
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It sounded like rain, until it changed direction—and then I knew it must be the wind. As it moved, it sounded watery as the sea, but also made a dry sandy sweeping noise. When it had blown off to some faraway plain, one could hear a sound like an advancing army—and that was the rain. The rain filled up the wells, delighted the pools, and gurgled cheerfully in the street; it uncorked the hills as if they were barrels and released floodwaters. It dislodged the earth, raised the ocean, picked things up and moved them elsewhere; then, like the prophet Elijah, it flew up into the skies and disappeared in a chariot of clouds.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Themes
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The Transformative Power of Nature
The speaker of "Like Rain it sounded till it curved" looks on in awe at a heavy rainstorm. The coming of this storm, the speaker observes, alters the whole world: rain fills up wells, raises the sea level, and—more mysteriously—"stir[s]" the "sites of Centres," moving things from where they were centered before, unsettling the world. Nature, the poem suggests, has an astonishing power to change and remake itself, and even something so ordinary as a rainstorm can bring total transformation.
The speaker feels the arrival of the rainstorm as the approach of "Hosts" (or armies): this is powerful weather, and at first it sounds dangerous. But the storm doesn't use its power for destruction. Rather, it seems to take a strange pleasure in merely changing the world beneath it. "Warbl[ing] in the Road," singing a cheery song, it gradually and gleefully alters everything it touches: it sends floods rushing down from the hills as if the earth were a barrel whose "spigot" has been pulled out, it "loosen[s] acres" of land into wet mud, it "lift[s] seas" with all that extra water.
In short, the rainstorm unsettles the "sites of Centres": after this rain passes, in other words, everything is off-kilter, nothing is where it was before. Its job done, the storm sails away on a "Wheel of Cloud" like the biblical prophet Elijah—an image suggesting that, prophet-like, the storm came to unsettle the landscape, to shake foundations and rattle certainties. Nature has the awe-inspiring, surprising power to transform the world.
Readers might also read this poem's vision of unsettling change symbolically. An inner storm, a storm of thought or feeling, might also shift the "sites of Centres," unexpectedly upheaving a person's understanding of the world and leaving them in a transformed emotional landscape.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Like Rain it sounded till it curved”
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Lines 1-4
Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I knew 'twas Wind—
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand—The poem begins with a disorienting noise. The poem's speaker—listening, readers might imagine, from inside a house—hears what at first sounds "like Rain." But then the sound "curve[s]," changing direction or tapering off, and the speaker knows that it's not rain, but wind.
Readers who have heard wind blowing across a field will know just what this speaker is talking about. A wind over grass can sound "wet as any Wave," eerily like a rainstorm, and yet "swe[ep] as dry as sand," bringing no rainfall with it. The precision of those two similes suggests why. The sounds of rain, waves, and sand are all made up of myriad little sounds happening at once: a whole shoreline of waves breaking, showers of rain dropping, countless grains of sand shifting. So too is the sound of wind on grass or leaves.
Alliteration brings the sound of the wind into the poem's language: the /w/ sounds of "Wind" and "walked as wet as any Wave" evokes a great whoosh.
The hushed, eerie, deceptive sound of this wind will turn out to be a premonition of what's to come: a great rainstorm which the speaker will evoke in sharp-eared detail. At just the same time, it will hint at a broader symbolic reading. The arrival of this rainstorm will work a lot like the arrival of an inner storm, an outburst of intense feeling or thought that leaves a person's mental landscape changed.
Already, the poem's world feels strangely conscious, alive, and purposeful. The wind, for instance, "walk[s] as wet as any Wave": personified, it strides across the landscape on its own mysterious business.
Dickinson will tell the story of the storm in one of her favorite forms. Though the poem is presented as one 16-line stanza, its ABCB rhyme scheme and its rhythms mean it sounds a lot like four ballad stanzas—Dickinson's go-to:
- Ballad stanzas are quatrains (or four-line stanzas) written in common meter.
- In common meter, each stanza alternates between lines of iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Like Rain | it sound- | ed till | it curved") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "And then | I knew | 'twas wind").
Dickinson often turned to this controlled, deceptively simple form, using it to embody strange, grand ideas.
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Lines 5-8
When it had pushed itself away
To some remotest Plain
A coming as of Hosts was heard
That was indeed the rain— -
Lines 9-12
It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
It warbled in the Road—
It pulled the spigot from the Hills
And let the Floods abroad— -
Lines 13-16
It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Symbols
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The Storm
The poem's transformative rainstorm might be read as a symbol of an inner storm—a sudden, intense fit of thought or feeling (or perhaps even a religious experience) that leaves a person profoundly changed.
The poem's images of a landscape transformed by storm, in which the "sites of Centres" have been uprooted from where they always sat, suggest that symbolic inner storms might leave a person with a totally new way of seeing the world or making meaning from it. The comparison of the storm to the prophet Elijah in the closing lines underscores that reading: a prophet's job is to unsettle their listeners and change the way they see the world, and that's precisely what a dramatic, transformative inner storm might do.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The speaker's similes capture the storm's strange power, its deceptions, and its contradictions.
The first harbinger of the storm is a wind that sounds "like Rain"—at least, until it "curve[s]." This evocative simile will feel just right to anyone who's heard a wind moving across a field, then falling off or changing direction.
Such a wind at first sounds like raindrops; as the speaker puts it, it "walk[s] as wet as any Wave," an odd little moment of personification that suggests waves and rains alike plant wet footprints as they go. But in fact the wind "swe[eps] as dry as sand." Besides presenting a surprising contrast with the wind's watery sounds, this simile captures the sense that the wind sounds like millions of little movements happening at once—whether it's the fall of raindrops or the whisk of sand grains.
This tricksy wind moves away, and a new sound intervenes: "a coming as of Hosts." The arrival of the actual rain, in other words, sounds less like rain and more like an advancing army. At first, this martial rainstorm seems oddly friendly: that vast army just tops up wells and "warble[s] in the road" like a playful child. At last, though, it fulfills its dangerous promise and "let[s] the Floods abroad," washing out the whole landscape.
When the rainstorm departs, it goes "like Elijah"—that is, like the biblical prophet said to have ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot carried on a whirlwind. That closing simile suggests that this rainstorm, like a prophet, came to shake things up, to leave the world changed in its wake.
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Metaphor
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Alliteration
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Allusion
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Parallelism
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"Like Rain it sounded till it curved" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- 'Twas
- Remotest
- Hosts
- Warbled
- Spigot
- Abroad
- Acres
- Elijah
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A contraction of "it was."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Like Rain it sounded till it curved”
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Form
"Like Rain it sounded till it curved" is written as one long stanza of 16 lines. However, the poem's use of common meter and its ABCB rhyme scheme means that it sounds rather like four quatrains (or four-line stanzas).
However one breaks it down, this was one of the forms that Dickinson liked best: a simple, flexible shape borrowed from ballads and hymns that she could use to contain wild, grand thoughts. Here as in many of her poems, she paints a sharply observed picture of a natural phenomenon, fitting a great deluge into a compact space.
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Meter
Like much of Dickinson's verse, "Like Rain it sounded till it curved" is written in common meter. That means that its lines alternate between iambic tetrameter (four iambs in a row, as in "Like rain | it sound- | ed till | it curved") and iambic trimeter (three iambs, as in "And then | I knew | 'twas Wind—").
True to its name, common meter is pretty common: it's often found in folk songs and hymns. Its earthy rhythms clearly appealed to Dickinson's ear, for she turned to this meter time and again, using its simple but rigorous shape to explore everything from passion to joy to the mystery of death.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's rhyme scheme runs like this:
ABCB
As is often the case in Dickinson, though, a number of the rhymes in that regular pattern are slant: Wind / sand, Road / abroad, stirred / Cloud. The poem's only perfect rhyme, in fact, is Plain / rain in lines 6 and 8.
All that slant rhyme gives the poem a spacious, diffuse feeling. Unhampered by tight, neat perfect rhymes, the poem sounds as wide-open as the storm-sodden landscape it describes.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is an awestruck observer, characterized only through what they see and how they see it. To this person, an intense rainstorm is a force with a personality, a creature as threatening as a great army, as cheery as a songbird, as unrepentantly chaotic as a guy who uncorks all the barrels in the brewery, and as fiery as the prophet Elijah. The speaker, then, sees a world full of intent, meaning, and symbolic power: the storm, through their eyes, might be as much an image of inner change as a natural phenomenon.
These lively, imaginative visions work in tandem with an eye for detail. The speaker's acute description of the sounds of the approaching storm suggests they have not just the spirit of a poet, but the precision of a naturalist.
Perhaps they even have the self-forgetfulness of a prophet. When the poem begins, the speaker seems to be shut up inside, only hearing the rain; as the poem goes on, the speaker becomes able to see the whole landscape beneath the deluge. The storm releases their imaginative vision, allowing them to travel far away from the "site[]" of their own "Center," their one small self.
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“Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Setting
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While the poem's rainstorm feels vivid and real, the setting remains pretty vague: this poem could take place anywhere there are "seas," "Hills," and a "Road." That generality makes the speaker's vision feel almost mythic. It's as if they're describing the archetypal essence of storminess at the exact same time as they observe the precise movements of this storm, from its changing sounds to its army-like charge.
This is only one of many Dickinson poems that takes a similar tack. In other poems, she watches the movements of a storm and the progress of a wind with an intent, full-body alertness. Dickinson felt the power of the natural world deeply, seeing in her surroundings as much danger and awe as beauty.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Like Rain it sounded till it curved”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) published almost nothing during her lifetime, and after 1865 she rarely even left her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. But from within her circumscribed world, she explored the heights and depths of human experience through her groundbreaking poetry.
No one else sounds quite like Dickinson. Her poems use simple, folky forms—ballad stanzas, for instance—to explore profound philosophical questions, passionate loves, and the mysteries of nature. This poem was one of many that she hid from the world her whole life; it didn't appear in print until well after her death in the 1945 collection Bolts of Melody.
While Dickinson didn't get too involved in the literary world of her time, she was still part of a swell of 19th-century American innovation. Her contemporary Walt Whitman (who became as famous as Dickinson was obscure) was also developing an unprecedented and unique poetic voice, and the Transcendentalists (like Emerson and Thoreau) shared her deep belief in the spiritual power of nature. Dickinson herself was inspired by English writers like William Wordsworth and Charlotte Brontë, whose works similarly found paths through the everyday world into the sublime, terrifying, and astonishing.
After Dickinson died, her sister Lavinia discovered a trunk of nearly 1,800 secret poems squirreled away in a bedroom. Published at last, Dickinson's poetry became internationally famous and beloved. Dickinson's work and her life story still influence all kinds of artists.
Historical Context
Dickinson wrote most of her poetry during the American Civil war, which ran from 1861 to 1865. She was firmly on the Union side of that bloody conflict; in one of her letters, she writes with delight about the ignominious defeat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who was reportedly trying to make his escape disguised in a woman's skirt when he was finally captured.
However, Dickinson rarely addressed the political world around her directly in her poetry, preferring either to write about her immediate surroundings or to take a much wider philosophical perspective. This poem might do both: its meticulous attention to a natural phenomenon might also symbolically speak of what it feels like to undergo an inner transformation.
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More “Like Rain it sounded till it curved” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem in Manuscript — See an image of the poem in Dickinson's own handwriting.
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The Poem Set to Music — Listen to a musical interpretation of the poem.
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — Visit the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum to find a wealth of knowledge on Dickinson's life and work.
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A Portrait of Dickinson — See the only confirmed portrait of Dickinson: a daguerrotype taken when she was a teenager.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Dickinson via the Poetry Foundation's short biography.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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