"The Fury of Rain Storms," by Anne Sexton
Author: Anne Sexton
“The Fury of Rain Storms.” The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, by Anne Sexton, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999.
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The rain drums down like red ants,
each bouncing off my window.
The ants are in great pain
and they cry out as they hit
as if their little legs were only (5)
stitche don and their heads pasted.
And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath (10)
without an umbrella.
Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.
The poet presents an image that reminds the reader of a “grave” or death.
The suggestion of something simple as making soup as a remedy calls to the reader’s mind that soup is often cited as a remedy for illness.
I see this as personification because she is comparing rain that is drumming to an ant, but ants do not drum and neither can the rain.
This personification of two elements of nature. One elemental and one biological. How might this fit the overall theme or message of the poem? What might it say about the subject of depression?
I think she’s seeing her depression as inescapable because both rain and ants can’t just disappear. Rain can come unexpected, and I believe she’s relating that to how random her depression can be. As to the biological standpoint of ants, they can’t just disappear. An ant is always being born somewhere and they won’t go extinct that easily. I can see Sexton relation her depression to ants because of how difficult it is to get rid of them.
The audience of this poem could be people dealing with depression or someone who knows someone with depression.
I think the audience is meant to be people dealing with their own depression or dealing with somebody else’s depression as well. I think it is sometimes hard to visualize what you are feeling when you feel so lost and alone. I think it is important that the author is helping those dealing with depression in some way visualize a example of what it feels like to be depressed. I believe that people who have depression feel like they are alone in this world, but this poem is showing them they are not alone.
It seems that this poem has no clear rhyme scheme. Why do you think the author used free-verse for a poem about depression?
The title of this poem, “The Fury of Rainstorms,” accounts for the majority of the poem. While the poem is focused on the description of rain, at the end, it is focused on depression. This leads me to believe that the “fury of rainstorms” is a metaphor for the harsh reality of Depression.
I would have to agree that “The Fury of Rain Storms” is referring to depression. Depression in my opinion feels like a cloud just following you around. Depression is just a rain storm over your head all the time. I think the people who struggle or have struggled with depression can clearly make that connection because it is something they have lived with.
Sexton uses a large amount of symbolism in this poem. She starts off with saying the ants are bouncing off her window and then that they are in great pain. While on the topic of depression and mental illness we have been focusing on it leads me to assume the window is posing as an obstacle for the ants in their battle against their mental illness and the pain they are feeling is the pain of trying to keep fighting against their illness.
The idea of the window being clear but still a barrier is really interesting to me. There is no permeable way for them to come inside or for the narrator to offer relief from the inside. Again, this tension between the inner and outer parts of the poem are brought to light again.
The Poem seems to give off somewhat of a dark and gloomy vibe to it, immediately starting with images of rain pouring down and pain within the minds of the poems recipients. Looking deeper into this however, we find that there is much more meaning to be discovered in the poem than just that.
The audience can be seen as people dealing with depression, but it can also be for those who do not know that they are depressed. Sexton is vulnerable o her audience, hopefully persuading them to do the same.
The phrase “drums down” is alliteration that actually suggests the “d” of hard drumming.
I picture the speaker on a couch while the rain “drums” on their window. You usually don’t feel energetic when you’re trapped inside and it’s pouring outside; it’s more a feeling of sleepiness. Interestingly, Sexton describes the rain as red ants “bouncing off her window.” I don’t think the context is meant to be literal, but rather more based on the effect of something so tiny hitting something so hard on the glass.I feel like the red ant symbolizes the speaker in a way, and in the life of the speaker, the window is an obstacle or challenge of some kind.
I can relate to the unenthusiastic feel that the poet seems to feel when it is raining. The whole poem to me seems to feel the same as I feel when it is raining, bored, alone, and sad.
The idea of these “ants” feeling this level of pain might be a way of communicating this depression is felt down into the smaller spaces of outer nature (other creatures). Why would it not be mirrored in our own?
When I read that the ants were “in great pain” I thought to myself I don’t even know if ants can feel pain. I then thought about other people who seem so bright and happy and how I’ve thought before that “they’re so happy they could never be sad or depressed” which is completely untrue. Sometimes the people I look at as incapable of being sad are the saddest ones in reality
Critics point to the idea of “disembodiment” the poet must have felt as a result of her depression.The ants here are literally presented as disembodied.
“They in line 7 refers to the ants that were the focus of the simile from line one. Now they are bringing to mind the idea of a grave and what it would look like. Anyone thinking “mounds?”
Does anyone else see that this poem has “turned” from the inside of lines 1-6 to the outside of a grave?
The transition is at first talking about the pain and suffering the ants are going through, which then brought a description of a grave into a picture. It is like these ants had died which then brought about the description of a grave because they had lived their life then resulting in afterlife.
That little “oh” in line 7 is more than poetic. It seems to be a second thought or a verbal sort of epiphany. That the ants the poet is seeing DOES remind them of something. It’s a small word that is carrying a lot of weight here. Think about “Oh.” You have to exhale to create this sound. The O comes of rounding the mouth and blowing out through the H.
I was analyzing the same thing. It is sort of like something came up and something triggered them to remember something. When I was reading through this poem it was like the ants are the thing that brought to mind a grave, which then transitioned to the rest of the poem.
The words ‘humble’ and the phrase “so willing” makes me think that there is an acceptance of these feelings. I think this shows the length of the battle with depression for the author.
Sexton’s assessment of depression as “boring” is interesting. How does she come to this summative assessment of the condition?
Maybe Sexton came to this from observation. Many people who suffer from depression tend to stay at home and not do much. Maybe she drew this conclusion from personal experience. A person that wants to do something, but can find no motivation to do it is bound to be upset with themselves and quite possibly bored with the things they are doing to fill their time.
Every time I come back to this line, I keep thinking about how it comes after all of this introspective thinking about rain and ants and graves. And now this summary comment on depression.
When reading through this poem and when I got down to this like I felt like it got really deep in a way. I went from rain to ants dying and then got a little deeper talking about graves and then lastly the author just brought depression into the picture. Which depression is a mental disability causing me to react and understand the poem switched directions and topics. Depression is an awful thing leading people to need medical help that is why I sought the poem to sort of change one’s mentality.
Line 12 would be the turning point in the poem because it is when Sexton comes to a conclusion about depression. Throughout the poem the author compared ants to the depressive state by demonstrating how they are in pain. The author also explained how graves are able to be beat upon because they are laying there, rotting such as an individual with depression might do. After describing how one might feel with depression, Sexton comes to the conclusion that it is boring. People with depression tend to not do anything. They rot inside as the day passes and most likely let people walk all over them, such as ants do.
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Depression is boring, I think. To what might Sexton be comparing this condition in order to come to this assessment.
Doing some light research on our author here, I found that Sexton suffered with postpartum depression. At the final lines of the poem, she says, “I think I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.” Being aware of her mental health history, I believe we can assume that writing, poetry specifically, provides an escape for Sexton, allowing her to escape her personal “cave” for some time to ignore the realities of life. When saying “Depression is boring,” she references/compares her own traumas she learned to live through.
1 Stanza.
4 Sentences.
14 Lines
What might the question have been that led Anne Sexton to write this piece?
After reading very little about Anne Sexton, I found that she used her poetry to help battle her depression. She did, sadly, lose her battle with depression. Her poetry is a reflection of this battle and tells her story. So I think some questions she may have been asking herself while writing this were, “How do I release my emotions in a safe way” or “How do I describe my depression?” I am not even sure if she really would have asked herself a question, but if she did it may have been like those.
You have the Entry Points. Here are three questions:
1. What do you see? (Isolate and Identify)
2. What does it mean? (Analyze)
3. How does what we see and what we assess lend to the overall meaning of a poem (theme)?
Throughout this poem, there is no rhyming happening between any words either within or at the line level.
This poem brings sad emotions to me. The first 5 stanzas are really descriptive and honestly make me a bit uncomfortable. I understand that Sexton feels this way all the time though due to her depression, which is why I think those first 5 stanzas are so deep and emotional.
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