Hailstones
Hailstones - meaning Summary
Sensation Becomes Memory
The poem turns a childhood hailstorm into a meditation on memory, pain, and later understanding. The speaker recalls being struck by hailstones and the strange pleasure of handling them as they melt, then broadens the scene to schooldays and shared experience. In the final section, the brief, sharp weather becomes a figure for disappointment: something first perfect and intense, then gone, leaving only traces to interpret.
Read Complete AnalysesI My cheek was hit and hit: sudden hailstones pelted and bounced on the road. When it cleared again something whipped and knowledgeable had withdrawn and left me there with my chances. I made a small hard ball of burning water running from my hand just as I make this now out of the melt of the real thing smarting into its absence. II To be reckoned with, all the same, those brats of showers. The way they refused permission, rattling the classroom window like a ruler across the knuckles, the way they were perfect first and then in no time dirty slush. Thomas Traherne had orient wheat for proof and wonder but for us, it was the sting of hailstones and the unstingable hands of Eddie Diamond foraging in the nettles. III Nipple and hive, bite-lumps, small acorns of the almost pleasurable intimated and disallowed when the shower ended and everything said wait. For what? For forty years to say there, there’s where to taste and test it: disappointment as the light opens in silence and a car with wipers going still lays perfect tracks in the slush
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