1. Read the text given below and answer the questions
that follow.
151
The Voice of the Rain
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 Poem 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 form'd,
altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to leave the droughts, 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
fulfilment, wandering,
Reck'd or unreck'd, duly with love returns.)
birth-place, after
- Walt Whitman