Rainbows
Write the arch that only exists because you are standing exactly where you are.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about rainbows: light imagery, ways past the kitsch, craft techniques, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this free Writory guide.
What this theme is
A rainbow is the hardest easy subject in poetry. Easy, because it is beautiful and everyone loves it; hard, for exactly the same reason. The theme comes buried under greeting cards, nursery murals and pots of gold, so a rainbow poem must first dig its subject out. What helps is the strange physics: a rainbow is not an object but an event between three things, sun behind you, rain ahead of you, and your own eyes. Move ten steps and it is a different rainbow. No two people have ever seen the same one.
That fact quietly transforms the theme. A rainbow poem is really a poem about a point of view, about standing in the one spot where sorrow and light line up and something impossible appears. It is also a poem about timing, since the arch needs the storm; there is no rainbow without the rain still falling somewhere in the picture.
Why poets return to it
Poets return to rainbows because they are the natural emblem of promise and aftermath. In the Hebrew flood story the bow is set in the clouds as a covenant that the waters will not come again, and every rainbow poem since has inherited a little of that meaning: the worst is over, look up. Writing that idea freshly, without piety or sugar, is a genuine craft challenge.
There is also the appeal of writing about wonder itself. Wordsworth put it plainly in 1807: 'My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky', and argued that if he ever stopped leaping he might as well die. A rainbow poem lets you test whether your own capacity for plain astonishment has survived adulthood, and whether you can get it onto the page without blushing.
Where it comes from
Mythology reached the rainbow long before optics did. Greek poets made it the path of Iris, messenger between gods and mortals; Norse tradition built Bifrost, the burning bridge between worlds, out of it; Australian Aboriginal traditions tell of the Rainbow Serpent shaping rivers and law. Nearly every culture read the arch the same way, as a bridge or a message, something connecting a high world to this one.
English poetry took both the wonder and the science. Wordsworth's leaping heart is the theme's most famous moment, but poets after Newton also worried at the prism: Keats complained that cold philosophy would unweave a rainbow, reducing it to spectrum and angle. That argument, between explanation and awe, is still live, and a modern rainbow poem can take either side or hold both.
The elements that carry it
- The remaining rain, the storm still visible under the arch, keeps the image honest and earns whatever hope the poem claims.
- Light behaving strangely, the brightened field inside the bow, a second fainter arch above the first, rewards poets who have actually looked.
- The unreachable end, receding as you walk toward it, gives the theme its built-in image of longing and pursuit.
- Small domestic rainbows, in a sprinkler, a puddle's oil film, a glass of water on a windowsill, bring the theme down to touchable scale.
- The named colours themselves, and the argument about where one ends and the next begins, offer a quiet metaphor for every boundary humans draw.
Techniques that work
- Keep the storm in the poem. A rainbow presented without its rain is decoration; a rainbow still braced against dark cloud is drama.
- Use the physics as feeling: the fact that every rainbow is private to its viewer can carry loneliness, luck or intimacy, depending on who else is standing there.
- Go small. A rainbow in a hose's spray above a paddling pool can say more about a family's summer than the full arch over a valley.
- Delay it. Let the poem live in grey weather for most of its length and give the bow only the final lines, so the reader feels the lift rather than being told about it.
- If you use the covenant tradition, translate it into your speaker's terms: what exactly is being promised, by whom, and does the speaker believe it?
Mistakes to avoid
- Pots of gold, leprechauns, 'somewhere over' anything. These references switch the reader into kitsch mode instantly; cut them unless the poem is deliberately playing with them.
- Using the rainbow as an unearned happy ending, stapled to a poem of grief to cheer it up. If hope arrives, the poem must pay for it with honest weather first.
- Listing the seven colours as if that were description. Name what the colours land on instead, the wet road turned briefly violet, the red edge against slate cloud.
- Forgetting the viewer. Since a rainbow exists only from one standpoint, a poem that never establishes who is looking, and from where, wastes the theme's best fact.
An exercise
Write about the last real rainbow you remember, but spend the first two thirds of the poem on the storm that preceded it: the specific rain, what it interrupted, who was there. Allow the rainbow itself no more than three lines, and end before anyone comments on it.
A challenge
Write a poem in which two people see the same rainbow from different places, a car park and a hospital window, two ends of a phone call, and it means something different to each. Let the poem hold both meanings without ruling between them.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a rainbow that appeared at the wrong time: during a funeral, an argument, a defeat. Follow what the beauty does to the moment rather than what the moment does to the beauty.
Before you submit
- The storm or rain is present somewhere in the poem.
- No pots of gold, no unearned uplift, no colour list standing in for description.
- The viewer's position and situation are established.
- At least one image comes from genuine looking rather than inherited rainbow language.
- The ending trusts the image; it does not explain that the rainbow means hope.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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