As They Begin To Rise Again - Analysis

After the water: recovery you can barely detect

The poem’s central claim is quiet but firm: renewal arrives first as a small, almost private sensation, not as a grand spectacle. We’re told that “they begin to rise again,” but the poem doesn’t celebrate with bright color or dramatic motion. Instead, it gives us a minimal sign of life: “Chrysanthemums faintly smell.” The comeback is measured in fragrance, and not even a strong one. What returns after disaster is real, but it’s subtle—something you notice only if you’re close enough, attentive enough, patient enough.

Chrysanthemums: resilience with a soft voice

Chrysanthemums can imply late-season steadiness, a flower that persists when other blooms have passed. Here, though, the chrysanthemum is not presented as triumphant. The smell is “faintly,” which makes the flower feel vulnerable and newly reappearing, as if it’s still shaken by what happened. The poem asks us to believe in a recovery that doesn’t announce itself: scent rather than sight, a trace rather than a proclamation. That faint smell becomes a kind of proof—life continuing, but cautiously.

“Flooding rain” versus “faintly”: a deliberate imbalance

The strongest pressure in the poem is the mismatch between the force of “the flooding rain” and the delicacy of what follows. “Flooding” suggests excess, overwhelm, a world briefly out of proportion. Against that, “faintly smell” is almost comically small. That’s the poem’s key tension: the world can be violent, and the signs of recovery can be nearly imperceptible. The speaker doesn’t deny the severity of the rain; instead, the poem insists that the aftermath is not defined only by damage. Something still rises—slowly, quietly—after being flattened.

The turn from weather to breath

There’s a subtle emotional turn in the final line. “After the flooding rain” repositions everything we’ve just read: the rising and the smell are not abstract; they are consequences, a response. The tone moves from endurance to intimacy, from public weather to a private sense of the air. The poem leaves us in that thin, cleared space after a storm, where the first good news is not a blue sky but a barely-there fragrance—life returning on a human scale.