“all at once there is no sound but rain
and the stream below us roaring
away into the rushing darkness”
– W.S. Merwin
In 1976, W.S. Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Zen teacher Robert Aitken. The influence of Buddhist thought is evident in much of Merwin’s writing, and in “Rain Travel,” we encounter the theme of interdependence. Though the poem begins with the speaker feeling atomized and alone–“I must start by myself on the journey…”–by the poem’s conclusion, we are swept up into a felt sense of infinite and eternal connection with the vastness of life. Merwin’s use of the imagery of single raindrops contrasted with a unified stream recalls Shunryu Suzuki’s famous essay in which he presents a Yosemite waterfall as a great teaching on separation and death.
Rain Travel
I wake in the dark and remember
it is the morning when I must start
by myself on the journey
I lie listening to the black hour
before dawn and you are
still asleep beside me while
around us the trees full of night lean
hushed in their dream that bears
us up asleep and awake then I hear
drops falling one by one into
the sightless leaves and I
do not know when they began but
all at once there is no sound but rain
and the stream below us roaring
away into the rushing darkness
“Rain Travel” by W.S. Merwin from The Essential W.S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2017
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Beautiful, simply simple and beautiful. I hear the rain drops dripping from the leaves