The Prophet Elijah, not surprisingly in view of his profession, was a shrewd forecaster. At the height of a prolonged drought in Israel he told Ahab: "Go up and eat and drink, for there is the sound of the abundance of rain." And, sure enough, a few hours later, "behold the heavens grew dark with clouds and wind, and there fell a great rain".
Elijah, presumably, was referring to the widespread belief that sound carries particularly well in the few hours immediately before a spell of rain. It is summed up in the old proverb:
When sound travels far and wide
A stormy day it doth betide.
But Elijah provokes another question: how can one describe the sound of rain itself?
The usual tomes of reference are not particularly helpful on the topic. One such, for example, sums it up as follows: "A heavy rain of large drops makes a distinctive sort of patter, particularly when falling on a body of water or on any hard flat surface.
"Everyone is familiar with this patter, but anyone who tries to explain it in all its details will probably come to the wise conclusion that the less said about it the better."
So much for today's Weather Eye, one might think. Yet even the above evasive writer has almost inadvertently concluded that the sound of rain is "patter". Others prefer a "spatter" or a "pelt", while some like "teem" or "lash", and on a hot or cold tin roof the sound is a "tattoo" or "drum".
Muriel Spark in Territorial Rights appears to think that rain can "snivel" - although here one detects an epithet or two transferred: "It is one of the secrets of nature in its mood of mockery, that fine weather lays a heavier weight on the minds and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented, than does a really bad day with dark rain snivelling unsympathetically from a dirty sky."
Algernon Charles Swinburne, on the other hand, prefers a "ripple":
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves, and ripple of rain.
But perhaps the most evocative description of the sound of rain is Proust's in A la recherche du temps perdu: "A little tap on the window-pane, as though something struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was rain."