Life & Mortality Quote by Guillaume Apollinaire

Rain has always been literature's clean metaphor, but Apollinaire makes it dirty with psychology. "It's raining my soul" opens like confession: the weather isn't outside, it's internal, a private storm that has crossed the border into the body. The repetition of "it's raining" feels like a mind stuck on a loop, the way grief or shock keeps replaying the same blunt fact until it becomes rhythm. Then the line snaps into something harsher: "dead eyes". Not tears, not droplets, but eyes - the organs of recognition and human contact - emptied out and falling everywhere.

The intent here isn't just to describe sadness; it's to stage a crisis of perception. If dead eyes are raining, the world is being flooded by unseeing. That can read as a portrait of modern alienation (the crowd, the city, the churn of faces), but Apollinaire's historical moment sharpens it into prophecy. He writes from the early 20th century, when Europe is sliding toward mechanized war and the avant-garde is inventing new forms to match a fractured reality. In that context, "dead eyes" are civilians numbed by speed and spectacle, and soldiers-to-be already hollowed out.

Subtextually, the line performs what it depicts: it breaks the expected consolations of lyric poetry. Rain usually refreshes; here it carries psychic debris. The surreal image isn't decorative - it's a refusal to sanitize trauma with pretty weather.