An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow - Analysis

A city pauses because one man won’t hide

Les Murray’s poem argues that public, unperformative grief is powerful enough to reorganize a whole city. The opening is almost comic in its civic specificity: names and places rattle off like a market report, from Tattersalls to the Stock Exchange to the Greek Club. This is a world of numbers, chalk, and bread in pockets, where feeling is supposed to stay private. Against that routine, a simple sentence spreads like news of a fire: There’s a fellow crying. The shock isn’t that he’s sad; it’s that They can’t stop him, as if emotion were a traffic violation.

The crowd wants to intervene, but also wants permission

The poem’s tone is both reportorial and mesmerized. We see the city jam up: traffic in George Street is banked up, back streets become sudden main streets, and people run and point. The crowd behaves like a single organism, drawn by a mix of concern, curiosity, and appetite. Yet the repeated line No one can stop him begins to sound less like incapacity than like an excuse. The crowd can’t stop him because, at some level, it doesn’t want to. His crying breaks a rule everyone depends on, and the onlookers hover at the edge of that broken rule, testing what it would mean to cross it.

Not a spectacle: grief with dignity creates a boundary

Murray is careful about what this weeping is not. The man weeps not like a child, not like weather, but like a man; he doesn’t declaim or beat his breast, and he doesn’t even sob very loudly. The poem strips away the signs of performance so the weeping can be understood as sheer fact. That restraint creates the central paradox: his quietness becomes a kind of force. The dignity of his weeping forms a protective zone, the hollow he makes around himself. Even uniforms who try to seize him end up staring, their authority temporarily suspended. The man’s grief is not requesting help, and that is precisely what disarms the impulse to control him.

A secular miracle that the poem refuses to call a miracle

Midway through, the poem tilts into religious language while refusing religious explanation. The man stands in midday light, in a pentagram of sorrow; later, the poem anticipates legends: Some will say a halo or force surrounded him. Then comes the blunt correction: There is no such thing. Murray creates a tension between the crowd’s need to mythologize and the poem’s insistence on ordinariness. The man is not a saint and not a sign; he is an ordinary body. And yet he produces effects that sound like grace: minds longing for tears the way children long for a rainbow. The poem doesn’t deny the experience; it denies the shortcut explanation.

Masculinity cracks: reserve trembles, peace arrives like judgement

One of the poem’s sharpest pressures is placed on masculinity. Murray names the city’s armor: fiercest manhood, toughest reserve, slickest wit. These are not villains; they are social strategies for not being overwhelmed. But in the presence of this weeping, that armor trembles with silence. The poem’s phrase unexpected judgements of peace is startling: peace is not comfort here, but a verdict, something that arrives and exposes what has been denied. Some people even scream who thought themselves happy, as if the man’s grief forces a reevaluation of their own stories. Happiness, the poem suggests, can be a kind of untested assumption until reality presses hard enough to make it audible.

Contagion: the gift and the fear of acceptance

The poem’s emotional turn becomes a kind of transmission. A man says Ridiculous and then clamps his hands over his mouth, as if it uttered vomit—a visceral image of disgust at vulnerability, but also panic at what might spill out. Immediately after, a woman shining reaches out and receives the gift of weeping, trembling as she takes it. Others follow. Murray draws a clean, unsettling distinction: some weep for sheer acceptance, while others refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance. The poem makes acceptance sound total, not selective: to accept grief might mean accepting love, failure, mortality, dependence, the whole package. The crowd isn’t only watching a man cry; it’s deciding whether to allow itself to be human in public.

A hard, message-less sorrow: as indifferent as earth

The man himself remains strangely unresponsive to the attention he creates. He is compared not to a prophet but to matter: like the earth, he requires nothing. He cries not words, not messages, but grief and sorrow, hard as the earth and present as the sea. This is the poem’s refusal of moral tidiness. There is no lesson he delivers, no cause announced, no public confession that would let the crowd file the incident away. Grief here is not communication; it is existence. That’s why it can’t be stopped: there is nothing to argue with, nothing to fix, nothing to buy off.

The ending refuses the crowd’s ownership

When the weeping ends, it ends without ceremony: he simply walks between us, mopping his face with the same dignity that held people back. The poem closes by making him elusive: Evading believers, he hurries off. That last detail matters. The crowd wants to turn him into a story—miracle, scandal, breakdown, symbol. The man refuses all of it by leaving. Murray’s ordinary rainbow is not a permanent sign in the sky; it appears, rearranges everyone’s sense of what is possible, and vanishes, leaving the city with the uncomfortable knowledge that its strictness was never the only way to live.