JULY has not quite lived up to the all-star billing she gets in John Clare’s The Shepherd’s Calendar:

Daughter of pastoral smells and sights
And sultry days and dewy nights
July resumes her yearly place
Wi her milking maiden face
Ruddy and tand yet sweet to view
When everywhere’s a vale of dew
And raps it round her looks that smiles
A lovly rest to daily toils
Wi last months closing scenes and dins
Her sultry beaming birth begins.

“Sultry” is not the first word that springs to mind about the weather so far, and, amidst the clouds and rain, there’s little chance of anyone becoming “ruddy and tand”.

All I can do is listen to the rain drumming on my roof, watch it falling beyond my window, and remember that rain has its own poetry, too, and, in some ways, is its own poetry. If a poem succeeds by the variety of its music, the subtlety and variation of the sounds it offers in each line, then rain has poetry in plenty: from thunderous drumming down to a diminuendo of the lightest little patter, from the small perfectly paced rhythmic plashes of drops that fall from leaf to pool, to the gurgle and rush of a rain-swollen river.

Of our contemporary poets it seems to be the Scots and the Irish who best catch the sight and sound of rain in their verse, which may itself be a comment on their weather. The opening of Don Paterson’s poem “Rain” is perfect:

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face.

His tetrameters there catch something of the atmosphere and attention of Andrew Marvell at his best. And, as for the Irish poets, Heaney is, as always, the master, and, in his poem “The Rain Stick”, he embodies, in the very sound of his words, the music of the rain he is evoking

. . . a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through.

Those words have, in their rhythmic and repeated w and sh, the very sound of the water sloshing and washing, as it runs down and backs up against itself; and then the new half-line that ends the sentence — “Come flowing through” — itself expresses the sudden clearing of a channel or passage that lets the water flow through smoothly and quietly again. Indeed, that whole poem turns and plays on rain as music. The reader is “a pipe Being played by water”, to hear a “diminuendo running through its scales”, and, at the last, in a diminuendo of our own, to “enter heaven Through the ear of a raindrop”.

So, I can while away a little time, compensate for a little lost activity, musing on the poetry of rain; but not for as long, as the rain itself can last. So, I go out on my errands, out for my dousing, for what Larkin called “A furious devout drench”. By the time I’m home again, the rain has changed its tempo, but still not ceased its drumming; and I concur with Shakespeare, writing perhaps in some such rain-drenched Elizabethan July as this, that “the rain it raineth ever day.”