"Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross"
About this Quote
Rain becomes less weather than verdict: it keeps falling, indifferent, relentless, a force that won’t let grief dry into something manageable. Sitwell’s line works because it refuses the comfort of metaphor as decoration. The repetitions and hyphenated pivots (- dark... black... blind...) feel like a mind worrying the same wound from different angles, each comparison tightening the moral pressure.
“Dark as the world of man” swings the blame outward, toward history and systems; “black as our loss” yanks it back into the intimate, communal “our.” That pronoun matters. This isn’t private elegy. It’s a collective bereavement, written in the shadow of World War II, when Sitwell’s poem “Still Falls the Rain” (1940) answered the Blitz with a kind of scorched liturgy. Rain here reads like bombs, like ash, like the endless, nightly repetition of terror - nature mimicking human cruelty.
Then the line detonates its strangest image: “blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.” Sitwell splices the year into crucifixion, making 1940 itself a tool of torture. It’s not orthodox theology so much as accusation: modern violence has reinvented the Passion at industrial scale, nailing bodies and cities with bureaucratic efficiency. “Blind” is the key twist. Nails don’t see; they only do. The subtext is that the era’s suffering isn’t guided by purpose or even hatred with a face - it’s mechanical, obedient, thoughtless.
Sitwell’s intent isn’t to moralize from above but to stage catastrophe in a register that can hold it: prayer turned inside out, where faith becomes the language of outrage.
“Dark as the world of man” swings the blame outward, toward history and systems; “black as our loss” yanks it back into the intimate, communal “our.” That pronoun matters. This isn’t private elegy. It’s a collective bereavement, written in the shadow of World War II, when Sitwell’s poem “Still Falls the Rain” (1940) answered the Blitz with a kind of scorched liturgy. Rain here reads like bombs, like ash, like the endless, nightly repetition of terror - nature mimicking human cruelty.
Then the line detonates its strangest image: “blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.” Sitwell splices the year into crucifixion, making 1940 itself a tool of torture. It’s not orthodox theology so much as accusation: modern violence has reinvented the Passion at industrial scale, nailing bodies and cities with bureaucratic efficiency. “Blind” is the key twist. Nails don’t see; they only do. The subtext is that the era’s suffering isn’t guided by purpose or even hatred with a face - it’s mechanical, obedient, thoughtless.
Sitwell’s intent isn’t to moralize from above but to stage catastrophe in a register that can hold it: prayer turned inside out, where faith becomes the language of outrage.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | "Still Falls the Rain" — poem by Edith Sitwell, 1941 (poem title and year). |
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