Wednesday, July 12, 1905

The rain is raining all around

It falls on field and tree

It falls on our umbrellas here

And on the ships at sea.

I remember Miss Luella Shaw, my first-ever schoolteacher, making the first form learn that little poem by heart, lo these many years ago. The very next day it rained—a grey Sunday with the red leaves half gone—and I could see the ships at sea, out there beyond the horizon, with our rain falling on them. I remember myself thinking the words, "From that day on I wanted to be a poet."

The words weren't true exactly but I felt sure I was going to write them sooner or later just the same. And you can see now that I have.

Then Miss Luella Shaw married a millionaire—or so the story went; probably he was only an American, but to us, all Americans were millionaires, leastways all the big red-faced ones—and boarded a train for the mythic land of California. She read us a poem about the West before she left, but I didn't love it as well as the rain poem.

That was the first poem I loved, though I had read other better poems before then without noticing. It was the first one I could see. I thought of it today as the rain fell on my lovely new grey umbrella and my neat grey suit. It fell all day as Aunt Iz and I rode the train in to Charlottetown, and it fell on the ferry and the waters it cut through, on the ships seen and unseen, on the chattering Americans in their furs and the fishermen slick and clamorous as seals.