Rain - Analysis

The storm as a social test

This poem treats rain less like weather than like a quick, ruthless exam of what people came for. A thunderstorm interrupts the outdoor concert, and the crowd’s first instinct is not devotion but self-preservation: they leave their seats, run inside, and make small performances of dignity—women giggling, men pretending calm. Bukowski’s central claim is blunt: most public “love” of art is conditional, dependent on comfort. The rain strips away the polite story the audience tells about itself.

The details sharpen that critique. Wet cigarettes are tossed—tiny sacrifices to inconvenience. Even the setting, with trees and a pavilion, divides the world into exposure and shelter, risk and safety. The poem watches people choose the pavilion, then watches them watch each other choosing it, as if the crowd’s true music is social conformity.

Music that keeps going, indifferent

Against this scrambling audience, the orchestra becomes almost impersonal: Wagner plays on. The phrase refuses to sentimentalize the performers; the music is a force that continues whether anyone “behaves” correctly or not. When the program shifts to Hungarian Rhapsody #2, it still rains, and the continuity matters: the storm doesn’t negotiate with culture, and culture doesn’t pause to plead with weather. The orchestra simply goes about its business, a line that makes art sound like labor—steady, practiced, unconcerned with applause.

That indifference creates a tension: if art is supposed to gather people, why does it look so alone here? The poem suggests a colder truth—that music may be most itself when it is not being used as a social occasion. The rain clarifies who is attending the event and who is attending the sound.

But look: the turn toward the solitary listener

The poem’s hinge arrives with but look, a sudden directive that pulls our attention away from the mass and onto a single figure: one man sits alone in the rain, listening. Everything reorganizes around that stillness. Where the crowd moves, he stays; where they protect their bodies, he offers his body up to the weather; where they chatter (giggling, pretending), he practices a kind of silence.

Bukowski makes the man’s listening almost stubbornly physical: he sits in the night, in the rain. The repetition insists that this is not a lapse or mistake; it’s a choice. And it redefines what the concert is. For the crowd, the pavilion becomes the goal. For the man, the music is the goal, even if it means being soaked.

The audience’s gaze: devotion read as defect

The poem’s sharpest irony is that the audience notices the listener and immediately turns him into a problem: There is something wrong with him, isn't there? Their question isn’t really about mental health; it’s a defense mechanism. If his behavior counts as genuine attention, then their retreat looks like a confession. So they pathologize him. Devotion becomes “wrong” because it exposes the crowd’s own bargain with comfort.

This is the poem’s key contradiction: the man is doing the most reasonable thing—he came to hear the music—yet he is treated as unreasonable. Meanwhile, the socially “normal” behavior (stampeding to shelter, performing calm, throwing away cigarettes) reads, under Bukowski’s eye, like a collective panic dressed up as manners.

A harder question the poem won’t let go of

If even the birds come in from the trees, what does it mean that a human chooses to stay out? The poem flirts with calling him a saint of attention, but it also leaves open a more unsettling possibility: maybe he stays not because he is noble, but because he is out of step with ordinary self-protection. The audience’s suspicion is cruel, yet the poem doesn’t fully cancel it; it lets the discomfort remain.

The final line as quiet vindication

In the end, Bukowski gives the man no speech, no explanation, no heroic flourish—only a plain motive: He came to hear the music. That simplicity is the poem’s verdict. The storm, the pavilion, the sideways glances from the crowd all fall away in comparison to a single, stubborn act of listening. The tone lands as both wry and tender: wry about the audience’s social theater, tender toward the person willing to be drenched in order to receive what he came for.