Into each life some rain must fall, some days must…

The lines close “The Rainy Day”, a short poem of three stanzas, the first two built as mirror images. The first describes the weather: a cold, dark, dreary day, a wind that is never weary, a vine clinging to a mouldering wall while dead leaves fall at every gust. The second applies the same words to the poet’s life: his thoughts cling to “the mouldering Past”, and “the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast”. The third turns to consolation: “Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; / Behind the clouds is the sun still shining”. His fate is “the common fate of all”, and the poem ends on these lines.

Longfellow, then a professor at Harvard, wrote it in the early 1840s. He had lost his first wife in 1835, and was courting Frances Appleton, who would not marry him until 1843. The line became proverbial, and in 1944 the Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald had a hit with a song called “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall”.

The Rainy Day, last lines, 1841

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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