The poem ‘Night Rain’ depicts a child’s reaction to rain falling at night in a local and impoverished riverside neighborhood. Rain and how it falls is a natural occurrence that man is aware of. It could be a welcome reprieve after a long period of extreme heat. It might also be a weapon of mass destruction for mankind. We can see from the personae that the night rain, which is a natural agent, is damaging to man because of how man has managed other components of the environment.
Rain and nature, in the first line, kill the food that man eats by causing it to slip off and break. Result of rain washing farm fields and food storage facilities away, this has resulted in food shortages, famine, and starvation. As a result, one may easily conclude that the personae depict a stressful scenario between man and nature when looking at the language geared toward destruction.
The man also suffers psychological trauma as the mother of the personae has to wake up from sleep in order to make some savings from the things being destroyed by nature. She does it with great discomfort because no one likes being woken up at that moment for a job like that.
Also, it seems it only applies to the personae’s mother due to her experience as a full man. For the child voice which is innocent the destruction of the rain is not a problem to him as it can be said that he has not gained the consciousness of a full-blown man to feel the effects of the strained relationship between man and nature. We know the trauma and discomfort the adult mother suffers as against the worries the child’s voice.
This is about more than simply man. Even animals are not immune to the devastation that rainfall delivers from nature. According to the poem
“Those wet of wings may not fly/bedraggled up on the iroko, they stand/emptied of hearts/ Therefore will not stir, no not/even at dawn,” says the narrator.
We see that the effects of the destruction are enormous as it brings heartbreaks, inactivity, and weaknesses. These are happening because man has not properly taken of nature as rainfalls are becoming more intense because of global warming which has increased in the last few years due to the industrialization and technological advancement of man.
“Mother is busy deploying/About our room let and floor/Although it is dark.”
This can be contrasted with the child’s voice in the last line:
“We will settle to our sleep of the innocent and free”
Through harmful acts such as bush burning, the adult personae have contributed to the straining of the relationship with nature. As a result, she must incur the cost of losing sleep in order to prevent products from being ruined by the night rain. The child who has done something, on the other hand, is content to sleep at night because it has caused him no harm. This indicates that if humans are not to blame for global warming creating damaging rain, we will have nothing to fear from nature because our relationship will be friendly.
