Take For Example This - Analysis

Midnight as a place where the self and the city blur

The poem’s central claim is that beauty arrives most powerfully when the world is so dark it feels indistinguishable from the self—and that this arrival pushes the speaker into making art as a way of reaching someone absent. Cummings begins by thickening darkness beyond the usual: the colour of midnight becomes a more than darkness, then suddenly expands into an identity statement: which / is myself and Paris and all / things. Midnight isn’t just a time; it’s a substance that dissolves boundaries. The speaker doesn’t stand apart from the city or the weather. He is inside a single, shared dark material where person, place, and all / things are fused.

That fusion matters because it sets up how the rain can feel like revelation rather than mere weather. The poem isn’t interested in describing Parisian rain for its own sake; it’s describing what happens when the outer world becomes intimate enough to feel like inner life.

The bright rain: a gentle contradiction that becomes the poem’s engine

Into this total darkness, something paradoxical occurs: the bright / rain. Rain is usually associated with grey, but here it is bright, and it occurs deeply,beautifully—as if it’s an event in consciousness as much as in the street. The key tension is already visible: the poem keeps holding opposites together without resolving them. Midnight is absolute, yet rain is luminous. Darkness is more-than-darkness, yet it produces a sensation of clarity. The speaker is in a private position at a window, yet what he feels seems to come from something larger than him.

Cummings makes that tension explicit when the speaker says he feels for no reason deeply completely conscious of the rain. The phrase for no reason refuses the usual explanations—memory, mood, narrative cause—so the consciousness that follows seems unearned, almost given. The intensity of awareness becomes its own mystery.

When the rain becomes a musician, the speaker stops being the author

The poem’s most important pivot inside the night is the moment when the speaker corrects himself: he is conscious not exactly of the rain, but rather / Somebody. That capitalized Somebody shifts the entire scene from observation to encounter. The rain is no longer simply falling; it is being used. This Somebody uses roofs and streets skilfully to make a possible and beautiful sound. Paris’s surfaces become instruments, and the weather becomes a kind of performance—composed, not accidental.

There’s a subtle contradiction here that the poem leans into: the speaker is the one writing, but he experiences creation as coming from elsewhere. He doesn’t claim to control the sound; he listens to it. His own consciousness feels almost like an audience to a maker who is neither named nor explained. This is why for no reason matters: if the beauty is authored by Somebody, then the speaker’s role is receptive before it is expressive.

The hinge: a clock strike and the rain’s delicate gestures turn into morning

The clearest turn happens when time enters: if a(perhaps)clock strikes. The parenthetical (perhaps) makes time uncertain, as if the speaker can’t tell whether the sound is literal or imagined. But immediately the poem treats the night as alive and the air as coolness, and the rain becomes a choreography of altogether delicate gestures. The weather is still art, but now it’s also an instrument for transition: out of these gestures, a colour comes,which is morning.

That line is the hinge because it shows the poem’s logic in miniature: morning is not announced by the sun or by a clear sky, but by a colour that arrives as if painted onto the world. The earlier colour of midnight is answered by a new colour, and the poem insists the reader accept this without skepticism: O do not wonder. Wonder, for Cummings here, isn’t delight; it’s doubt. He’s asking us not to treat this as an odd metaphor but as the most accurate way to name how dawn is felt from a window after long rain.

Addressing the absent lady: art as an almost-missed reaching

Once morning arrives, the poem reveals what the night’s beauty has been pressing toward: a relationship. At the edge of day, the speaker says he surely / make a millionth poem that will not wholly / miss you. The phrasing is tender and severe at once. Calling it a millionth poem makes the act feel habitual, even futile—he has done this endlessly. And yet he doesn’t promise success; he only hopes the poem will not wholly / miss its target.

This is the poem’s emotional tension: the speaker is newly awakened—deeply completely conscious—but consciousness does not guarantee connection. He can hear a world being made beautifully, but he still might fail to reach the person he addresses. The rain-music leads to dawn, and dawn leads to writing, and writing leads to the risk of missing.

One of the thousand selves: love as multiplication, not possession

The closing lines deepen the stakes by making creation personal and strange. If he creates, he says, he will create one of the thousand selves who are your smile. The self is no longer singular. Earlier, midnight contained myself and Paris and all / things; now the beloved seems to contain multitudes, and the speaker can only approach her through multiplying versions of himself. The poem suggests that love doesn’t give you a stable identity; it fractures and proliferates you. And the beloved’s power is expressed not through a narrative of romance, but through a single feature—your smile—made vast enough to house thousand selves.

This ending also reframes the Somebody of the rain. The speaker has witnessed an outside maker arranging roofs and streets into sound; now he tries, in his own medium, to arrange words into a figure that might approach the beloved. His art imitates the rain’s artistry: it is an attempt to make something possible and beautiful out of ordinary materials.

A sharper question at the edge of day

If the poem might not wholly / miss you, what would it mean for it to wholly hit? The speaker seems to believe that complete contact is impossible—that at best, art can be a near-touch, like morning arriving as a colour rather than a fully explained fact. In that sense, the poem’s gentleness isn’t reassurance; it’s honesty about how far a voice at a window can travel.

What the poem finally insists on

Take for Example This argues, in its own drifting, precise way, that the world’s beauty is not separate from loneliness; it may even intensify it. The brighter the rain in midnight, the more the speaker feels compelled to answer it with making—yet making is haunted by the possibility of missing. Still, he makes the millionth poem anyway, because dawn is coming, because the roofs and streets have already been turned into music, and because love—like Paris in the dark—expands until it is all / things.