During Wind and Rain by Thomas Hardy
Quick answer: During Wind and Rain by Thomas Hardy, analysed stanza by stanza: the family scenes, the devastating refrains, and how the poem turns time into weather.
Four bright scenes of family life, each one smashed by weather. During Wind and Rain (1917) may be the most quietly devastating poem Hardy ever wrote. A household sings around candlelight; they clear the garden moss and make it a pleasant place; they breakfast on the lawn under the summer tree; they move house, their belongings out on the sunny lawn. And after each scene a refrain cries out against the years, and a final image of storm damage falls like a verdict.
The scenes come from the childhood memories of Hardy's late wife Emma, written down in her recollections and read by Hardy only after her death. Knowing that, the poem becomes an elegy for a whole vanished family, seen through a dead woman's eyes.
What the poem says
Each stanza opens in domestic happiness rendered in the present tense, as if the moments were still happening: they sing their dearest songs, treble and tenor and bass, with one player at the candle-lit piano. They make the garden gay. They sit at breakfast in the shade while summer birds come close. They change to a high new house with brightest things displayed on the lawn.
But every stanza carries two blades. Midway comes the refrain, alternating between versions of 'Ah, no; the years' with an anguished O, and at each stanza's end an image of destruction: sick leaves reeling down in throngs, the white storm-birds winging across, the rotten rose ripped from the wall, and finally the rain ploughing down the carved names on the family gravestones. That last image tells us, without a word of explanation, where everyone in the poem now lives.
How it works
The structure is a machine of contrast: happy scene, refrain, storm image, repeated four times with variations. The present tense of the scenes is the cruellest choice in the poem, because it makes the reader inhabit moments the refrain has already condemned. Hardy is running memory and loss simultaneously rather than in sequence.
The prosody rewards close attention. The stanzas are songlike, echoing the family's own singing, with short lines and repeated rhymes, and each closing line lengthens like a wave breaking. The storm images escalate in violence from stanza to stanza, leaves to storm-birds to torn rose to eroded gravestone, so the poem's weather system builds toward the churchyard. The final verb, the raindrop ploughing the carved names, makes even remembrance erode: water is slowly deleting the family's identity from their own graves.
Why it lasts
Critics regularly place During Wind and Rain among the greatest short poems of the twentieth century, and its method explains why: it never states its subject. Time, death and the extinction of a family are delivered entirely through arrangement, tense and weather. Nothing is argued, so nothing can be argued with.
It lasts too because everyone owns its raw material. Every reader has a candle-lit equivalent, some scene of family happiness that the years have already condemned. Hardy built the frame; readers cannot help supplying the picture.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the double refrain: a repeated cry in mid-stanza and a repeated position (final line) for the counter-image, both varied in wording each time. The structure gives you the emotional force of a ballad with none of its predictability. When judges assess structure and emotion together, as Writory's do each month, this kind of engineered repetition is exactly what separates a moving poem from a maudlin one.
Steal the present tense for the past. Writing dead moments as if they are still occurring, then undercutting them, produces the double vision that makes elegy hurt. And let weather do your commentary; a ripped rose says more than any sentence about mortality.
What poets can take from this
- Write lost scenes in the present tense and let a refrain contradict them.
- Escalate a recurring image (weather, traffic, tide) across stanzas toward a final verdict.
- End on physical erosion rather than stated grief.
- Vary each repetition of your refrain slightly so it accumulates rather than repeats.
- Ground each stanza in one concrete communal activity: singing, breakfasting, moving house.
- Trust arrangement to carry meaning; never explain the contrast you have built.
Try it yourself
Write a four-stanza poem of family scenes in the present tense. Interrupt each stanza with the same short cry against time, worded differently each round, and end every stanza with an image of weather undoing something.
Questions
What is During Wind and Rain about?
The poem sets four joyful scenes of a family's life against refrains lamenting the passing years and images of storm damage. It ends at the family's graves, making it an elegy for time's destruction of a whole household.
Whose memories inspired During Wind and Rain?
The scenes derive from the childhood recollections of Emma Hardy, the poet's first wife, which Hardy read after her death in 1912. The family in the poem is understood to be hers, at Plymouth.
What is the effect of the refrain in During Wind and Rain?
The alternating refrains break into each happy scene like the weather of the title, refusing the reader any comfort. Their slight variations make the lament build across the poem instead of merely repeating.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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