It Struck Me Every Day - Analysis

Lightning as an event that won’t stay in the past

This poem’s central claim is that some shocks don’t behave like weather: they don’t pass, they recur. The speaker describes lightning as if it were happening again and again, not once. It struck me every day makes the experience cyclical, almost routine, yet the next line insists it’s always as new. That pairing—daily repetition and fresh impact—sets up the poem’s main tension: how can something be both constant and surprising? The speaker isn’t simply remembering a storm; she’s living in a state where the mind keeps replaying the strike as if the sky were still splitting.

The tone is stunned but controlled: the language stays plain and declarative, even as the subject is overwhelming. That restraint makes the pain feel more credible, like someone reporting symptoms rather than dramatizing them.

The sky’s slit: a wound that becomes a source of fire

The lightning arrives through an image that feels almost surgical: the cloud slit open, then let the fire through. The verb slit turns the sky into flesh—something cut—and the lightning into what leaks out of that cut. This matters because it frames the event as an injury with consequences, not just a spectacle. It also suggests the speaker’s own experience: something in the world (or in the self) has been opened, and now fire is able to enter.

Even in these first lines, the poem quietly blurs external nature and internal condition. The lightning is meteorological, but the speaker calls it something that struck me, as if it were aimed, personal, intimate.

From weather to symptoms: night, dreams, and mornings

The second stanza shifts from seeing lightning to being physically altered by it: It burned me, It blistered, It sickened. The escalation is bodily and involuntary, as if the storm has become an illness. The time markers widen the storm’s reach: it happens in the night, in my dream, and then again under every morning’s beam. The speaker can’t locate safety in sleep or daylight; even morning—usually cleansing—brings back nausea. That phrase sickened fresh is especially revealing: the pain is not just ongoing, it keeps renewing itself, like a wound that refuses to scab.

This is where the poem’s contradiction sharpens. Lightning is instantaneous, but the speaker experiences it as duration. The mind keeps producing the strike—dreaming it, re-seeing it—so the body keeps reacting. The poem begins to sound less like a report about a storm and more like a portrait of lingering shock.

The turn: expecting brevity, receiving an indefinite sky

The third stanza provides the poem’s hinge. The speaker admits an expectation: I thought that storm was brief, even quickest—a flash and then an exit. That belief is almost a plea for ordinary physics and ordinary time. But the next lines deny it: Nature lost the date of this. The storm isn’t just longer than expected; it has slipped out of the calendar entirely. The phrase gives Nature a strange forgetfulness, as if the world itself failed to file the event under then and instead left it under now.

And left it in the sky lands with quiet dread. The lightning becomes a permanent fixture overhead, not a past occurrence. The poem ends without relief, but with a kind of final diagnosis: what should have been weather has become atmosphere.

A sharper question the poem won’t answer

If Nature is the one who lost the date, who is responsible for keeping it? The speaker’s daily striking suggests that the mind itself has become the sky that won’t clear, holding the storm in place and re-releasing it with each morning’s beam. The poem never says what the storm represents, but it insists on the same brutal fact: the event’s end is not guaranteed by its supposed brevity.

What the poem leaves us with: permanence disguised as repetition

By the end, the speaker’s predicament is not just that she keeps remembering; it’s that the shock keeps arriving as present. The poem’s bleak ingenuity is to treat trauma (or grief, or any durable disturbance) as a natural phenomenon that has stopped obeying nature’s own rules. Lightning should be rare and fast, but here it is every day, always as new, and inexplicably still hanging overhead. The final image makes the suffering impersonal—just in the sky—and therefore harder to bargain with. You can’t argue with weather; you can only live under it.