Explore the poem

This is a poem full of hope and optimism. It celebrates the way that the light refreshing ‘silver’ rain helps to bring new life into the world every spring.

Have another look at the flower lifting its head in the first verse and the trees singing in the second verse. Can you see how the flower and the trees are given joyful living movements? What else in the poem is singing?

This poem is lovely to speak aloud with its gentle rhythm and the music in the sound of words. Try to catch lightness and joy in the way you speak it.

The words “Of life…” are repeated three times in line eight. Experiment with saying them slightly differently each time to build a mood that suits the poem.

About Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was born in the city of Joplin, Missouri, USA. After his father left Hughes was brought up by his grandmother while his mother travelled to find work. When his grandmother died, he lived with family friends and then with his mother who had remarried. At high school Hughes wrote poetry, short stories, plays and newspaper articles. A year in Mexico with his father was followed by an unsatisfying year on an engineering course at Columbia University in New York. Hughes left, took various jobs and then joined the crew of a ship and spent six months travelling to Europe and West Africa. He continued to write on his return to the US and had his first collection of poems, The Weary Blues, published in 1926.

Hughes published in many different genres, for adults and children, for the next forty years. He represented the lives of African-American people in poems of music, joy, sadness and struggle, influenced by poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and Walt Whitman but also by jazz music. He was an early innovator of ‘jazz poetry’ which draws on the rhythms and improvisation of jazz, and a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a vibrant literary and artistic movement that developed from the black New York neighbourhood. Hughes wrote regularly for Crisis magazine, an influential journal of “civil rights, history, politics and culture”, and became an important political voice through a weekly column in a leading black newspaper The Chicago Defender. He died in New York in 1967.