Edith Sitwell found inspiration in bombs. Dated September 6, 1941, “Still Falls the Rain” is a typically impressionistic response to the Blitzing of Britain, which had begun on September 7, 1940 (although, to the wartime reader, that word “Still” would have suggested the recent past rather than the immediate present, since the last major raid on London had taken place in the summer). She would write “The Shadow of Cain” in 1945, in response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In her own eyes, her style had now changed somewhat from the earlier rhyming tomfoolery of "Façade". “I use lines of great length – these need considerable technical control”, she wrote, “sometimes unrhymed, but with occasional rhymes, assonances, and half-assonances, used, outwardly and inwardly in the lines, to act as a ground rhythm.”

Sitwell had written little poetry at all during the 1930s, and “Still Falls the Rain” is one of three poems to appear in the TLS, to which she was also a frequent correspondent, during the early 1940s, marking her renaissance. The timing matters because, as the third line of the poem shows, Sitwell’s Dives and Lazarus – those representatives of “the sore and the gold”, suffering alike under the bombs – are figures in the grandest possible drama: for every year in the Christian era, there is a cruel nail in Christ’s cross.

Sitwell’s quotation from the final scene of Doctor Faustus suggests that mankind, in its self-destructiveness, risks missing out on Christ’s mercy – like Marlowe’s erring scholar.

Still Falls the Rain
(The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain -
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet.

On the Tomb:
Still falls the rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross,
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain –
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in his Heart all wounds, – those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear, –
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On this helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain –
Then – O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune –
See see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament.
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fire of the world, – dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of the One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who amongst beasts has lain –
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

(September 6, 1941)

EDITH SITWELL


To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Death's Door" by Thom Gunn, click here.

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