Rain Means Sad: Retiring the Weather Symbolism Cliche
A contest judge explains why rain-equals-sad is the most common weather symbolism cliche in submissions, and shows exactly how to make weather earn its place in a poem.
Last November I scored forty-one contest poems in one weekend. Nineteen of them opened with rain. Not one of those nineteen was a poem about rain. The rain was there to tell me the speaker was sad, the way a laugh track tells you a joke has happened. That is the weather symbolism cliche in its purest form: precipitation as emotional signage. And I want to make the case, as someone who reads thousands of submissions a year, that it is quietly the most common reason otherwise strong poems score low on originality.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Every single one of those nineteen poets would tell you they know rain-equals-sad is a cliche. They wrote it anyway. So this is not a knowledge problem. It is a habit problem, and habits need a replacement behavior, not a lecture.
Why the Weather Symbolism Cliche Survives Every Workshop
The shorthand goes back centuries and it worked, once. John Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy in 1856 to describe nature mirroring human feeling, and he meant it as a criticism even then. If the device was tired in 1856, it has now been tired for one hundred and seventy years. You can read more about the term itself in our entry on the pathetic fallacy, but the short version is this: when weather only mirrors mood, it does no work of its own.
The cliche survives because it is genuinely useful scaffolding. When you sit down to write about your grandmother's funeral, the rain arrives in the first line because it sets tone instantly and cheaply. It is the emotional equivalent of writing "Once upon a time." Fine for a first draft. Fatal in a final one, because a judge reading poem after poem sees your rain next to eleven other rains that same afternoon, and they all blur into one grey wash.
Movies made it worse. Film needs visible weather because a camera cannot photograph an interior state, so it rains at funerals on screen. But a poem can go directly inside a mind. Borrowing cinema's workaround means giving up the one advantage your medium has.
The Forecast Judges Can Recite From Memory
These are the pairings I see so often I could sort submissions by them:
- Rain for grief, always beginning in line one, often "drumming" on a window.
- Storms for anger or a marriage ending, complete with one lightning strike at the turn.
- Winter for death, depression, or an elderly parent.
- Spring, usually with one crocus, for recovery and hope.
- Sun breaking through clouds in the final stanza, the meteorological happy ending.
- Fog for confusion, memory loss, or "the uncertain future."
- Wind for change, restlessness, or the dead speaking.
None of these is forbidden. Every one of them can be written brilliantly. The problem is direction of travel: in a cliche, the feeling comes first and the weather is hired to advertise it. In a living poem, the weather is real, specific, and slightly wrong for the mood, and the feeling has to negotiate with it.
Make Weather Do Work, Not Mood
Weather in a poem should change what happens, not announce how to feel.
That is the whole repair in one sentence. Weather that changes something is plot. Weather that announces something is wallpaper. Watch the difference in a worked example. Here is a stanza I wrote in the default mode, the kind I score every month:
The rain fell hard the day we buried you,
grey clouds hung heavy in the weeping sky,
and every drop was one more tear I knew
I could not cry.
The sky does the crying so the speaker does not have to. It is outsourced emotion. Now the same funeral with weather that acts instead of emotes:
It rained, so the caterer moved the sandwiches indoors,
and my uncle stood in the doorway holding your good umbrella,
opening it, closing it, like he was asking it a question
it kept refusing to answer.
The second version never says sad. But the rain has consequences: it moves the food, it puts the dead woman's umbrella into a living man's hands, and the grief shows up in his fidgeting, not in the clouds. The weather created the image; it did not caption it. This is close cousin to what we teach about imagery generally: the concrete detail must precede the emotion, not decorate it.
The Five-Step Weather Audit You Can Run Tonight
Take any poem of yours that contains weather and run this sequence. It takes ten minutes.
- Delete every weather line and reread. If the poem's meaning is untouched, the weather was decoration. Either cut it for good or give it a job before you let it back in.
- Check the direction. Ask: did I pick this weather because it matches the mood? If yes, flip it. Grief on the first warm day of April is stranger and truer than grief in the rain, because loss famously refuses to coordinate with forecasts.
- Give the weather one consequence. Someone gets wet, a window must be shut, a game is cancelled, the power fails. The moment weather forces an action, it stops being a symbol and becomes an event, and events can carry feeling without labeling it.
- Localize it. "Rain" is generic; "the rain that filled the dog's bowl on the porch overnight" belongs to one poem on earth. Region, season, and specific damage are your friends.
- Move it off line one. Opening with weather is a throat-clear. If the rain matters, it will matter more in stanza three, after we know whose funeral it is.
When Weather Earns Its Keep
I am not arguing for poems set in climate-controlled rooms. Some of the best poems in English are weather all the way down, and the difference is always the same: the weather behaves like a character with its own agenda. Emily Dickinson, watching a storm arrive, wrote:
The Wind begun to knead the Grass,
As Women do a Dough
Nothing there tells you what to feel. The wind is busy, domestic, a little unsettling, and it is doing something to the grass rather than symbolizing something about the poet. Thomas Hardy's storms are the same: they interfere, they soak, they interrupt conversations. If your poem sits inside a large emotion, especially in poems on grief, where the rain reflex is strongest, ask what Dickinson asked: not "what does this weather mean" but "what is this weather doing."
There is also a legitimate advanced move: using the cliche on purpose and breaking it. A poem that opens with funeral rain and then admits, "actually it was sunny, I keep adding the rain when I retell it," is suddenly a poem about how memory edits grief. That poem I would score high, because it knows the convention well enough to interrogate it.
What This Looks Like on a Scoresheet
I judge for Writory's monthly contest, where every entry receives a score across five criteria, and the weather symbolism cliche bleeds points in at least three of them: creativity, because the image is borrowed; language, because cliche pairings drag cliche phrasing in with them (skies weep, clouds loom, storms rage); and emotion, oddly enough, because outsourced feeling reads as less felt, not more. A poem I scored last winter described a blizzard the night a marriage ended, and the detail I still remember a year later was not the snow. It was the husband scraping one windshield and not the other. The storm mattered because of what it made him do.
The fix is rarely deletion. It is demotion. Take weather out of the symbolism department and put it in the events department, and it will pay you back with images no other poet in the stack has.
Open the Window Before You Submit
So here is the closing argument. The weather in your poem is not your feelings. It is the world, going about its business, magnificently indifferent to your funeral, your divorce, your diagnosis. The truest weather poems are built on exactly that indifference, and the friction between an unbothered sky and a devastated speaker generates more feeling than a thousand weeping clouds ever will. Auden knew it: suffering happens while someone else is eating or opening a window.
Run the five-step audit on the poem you were about to send out. If the rain survives, it will have earned its place, and a judge will feel the difference within two lines. Then send the poem in and let the scoresheet confirm what you already suspect: the day you stop asking weather to feel for you is the day your poems start doing it themselves.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.