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.