Summary
The speaker begins with the exclamation “Lana Turner has collapsed!”, news he learned on the way to meet a friend one day in New York City. He was “trotting along” with a degree of urgency, when it began to rain and snow. He remembers that his friend—the “you” whom he addresses in the poem—said it was hailing, but the speaker insists that it was “really snowing and raining.” He says that he was in a hurry to meet this person, but the traffic—in addition to the inclement weather—delayed their meeting.
Analysis
The first half of the poem follows O’Hara’s customary “I do this, I do that” style. The speaker, while going about his day, is interrupted by some unexpected news or event, which inspires him to record his thoughts and actions related to his circumstance. O’Hara’s speaker is simultaneously active, caught within the busy tide of New York City, and contemplative, in that he frequently makes connections between his own life and experiences and the world he inhabits.
The aside the speaker inserts when he directly addresses an unnamed, second-person character reveals character, bolsters the poem’s imagery, and adds to the poem’s urgent tone. We learn that O’Hara’s speaker is the kind of person who listens and pays attention to details: his careful assessment of the weather in relation to his friend’s comments displays his concern with precision, both in the context of his own experience and in the context of what he’s been told by someone else. His emphasis on rain and snow strengthens our image of the speaker rushing through traffic, and echoes Turner’s aforementioned collapse. The fast pace of his language—many monosyllabic words, choppy diction, and numerous conjunctions—parallels the speaker’s hurry. Although O’Hara only includes a few simple lines about the weather, the sensory details they evoke reveal a great deal about the poem’s tone and atmosphere, foreshadowing the speaker’s disillusionment at the end. At the same time, the extravagance of his description creates a humorous tone.
The simile “the traffic/ was acting exactly like the sky” evokes an image of crowded, noisy streets, filled with honking cars impatient to reach their destinations but ultimately powerless to make the traffic move any more quickly. It also suggests the chaos of the scene. Like the rain and snow pummeling the speaker, the cars are just as aggressive and undiscriminating in their commute.
