All Summer In A Day

“It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again.” 

In establishing the story’s setting, Bradbury uses repetition to evoke the monotonous and seemingly endless nature of Venus’s downpour; “thousands upon thousands of days” pass, and “a thousand forests” grow and die, but the rain continues. Bradbury captures these storms’ torrential nature through onomatopoeic descriptions of their sound; the repetition of hard consonants (d, g, c, etc.) creates a percussive effect similar to the “drumming” of the rainfall. The comparison of the storms to a “tidal wave” underscores their violence and suggests that on Venus, the natural world is at least as destructive as it is life-giving. Consequently, the settlers do not enjoy the same kind of relationship with nature that they had on Earth.

“She knew that they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum […] and their dreams were gone.” 

Because the children were toddlers the last time the sun emerged, they have no direct and conscious knowledge of it; instead, they have vague bodily impressions of sunlight, and the story calls even these into question by describing the children as thinking they remember rather than simply remembering. What’s more, any lingering memories the children do have pale in comparison to the constant daily reality of rainfall and therefore only emerge when the children are sleeping.