When I read Walt Whitman’s “The Voice of the Rain,” I had flashbacks to 11-year-old Nafiza listening to Selena Gomez’s “A Year Without Rain;” where she sang about how being without her lover is like being without rain. Today I had listened to it again for the first time in years and it truly reminded me of how it was one of my favorite songs at that age. It brings up the importance of rain and highlights how difficult it is to survive a year without rain just as it would be difficult to survive a year without her loved one.

A day without you is like a year without rain
I need you by my side
Don’t know how I’ll survive
A day without you is like a year without rain, oh, oh-oh
Whoa, whoa

The song relates to the theme of Whitman’s poem because it too shows the importance of rain, however, whilst the poem gives a direct voice to rain; I think Gomez also gives an indirect voice to the rain. The song shows how impactful rain is with the lyrics ” So let this drought come to an end
And make this desert flower again
I’m so glad you found me
Stick around me baby, baby, baby, ooh
It’s a world of wonder with you in my life.” It shows how Gomez is placing a heavy emphasis on the necessity of rain and giving rain its due in such a way that it gives rain its own voice.

Both the song and the poem have highlighted rain in different ways but both have also been able to properly and rightfully give rain its voice and highlight its magnificence. The poem allows rain to speak for itself and tell the readers about rain while the song allows rain to be shown as a beautiful and important thing; that without a day of love it would feel like a year without rain. Which in itself would be devastating and terrible for anyone to endure that time because of how incredible and powerful and important and necessary rain truly is.

“The Voice of the Rain” by Walt Whitman

AND who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poém of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
      and beautify it:
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,
Recked or unrecked, duly with love returns.)