St Swithin’s Day weather rhyme

The St Swithin’s Day weather rhyme turns an old rain superstition into a small, recurring point of contact between Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. Its prediction is deliberately imprecise, its verse deliberately unfinished, and its return in Greece sets the promise of rain against a day of uninterrupted sun. The expression works both as a joke shared between the two and as a weather motif that the novel can revisit in a markedly different setting.

The Saying and Its Prediction

Dexter introduces the saying by identifying the day as St Swithin’s Day, then explains the supposed consequence of rain: “If it rains today it’ll rain for the next forty days, or all summer, or something like that.” The alternatives matter. Rather than presenting a precise forecast, he gives a loose, shifting tradition, including two possible spans of bad weather and no firm account of how the rule is meant to operate. When Emma asks where it would have to rain, Dexter answers, “On St Swithin’s grave. He’s buried outside Winchester Cathedral.” The grave supplies the superstition with a particular place, even as Emma’s question exposes how strange and geographically uncertain its logic sounds.

Dexter calls the saying a superstition, not a dependable explanation of the weather. Emma points out the difficulty of defining a rainy day by asking whether the rain would have to fall in one specific place; the exchange makes the proverb’s vagueness part of its comedy. Its apparent authority comes from tradition, while its conditions remain hard to pin down. The rhyme therefore carries the familiar form of a rule without the certainty of one.

A Poem in the Conversation

Asked how he knows the story, Dexter says that he went to school in the place he has just mentioned. His answer gives the exchange a personal source: the saying is not offered as an abstract piece of folklore but as something attached to his own past. Emma’s brief, teasing response keeps the explanation from becoming solemn. Their conversation moves from the meaning of the tradition to Dexter’s knowledge of it, and then to the verse itself.

Dexter recites, “If on St Swithin it doth rain/Something dum-di-dum again.” The line begins in the heightened, old-fashioned register of a weather rhyme, but its ending withholds the rest of the verse. Emma calls it a beautiful poem; Dexter immediately clarifies, “Well, I’m paraphrasing.” That correction changes the status of what she has heard: the charming fragment is not presented as a complete quotation, and its conspicuous blank is part of the joke. The rhyme’s unfinished sound also leaves its prediction unfinished, echoing the earlier uncertainty about whether the rain lasts forty days or all summer.

The Motif in Greece

The expression returns on a St Swithin’s Day during Emma and Dexter’s holiday among the Dodecanese Islands. The weather reverses the proverb’s imagined threat: under an immense blue sky, there is no chance of rain. The two lie side by side on the sun deck of a ferry crossing the Aegean Sea, sleeping off the previous night’s taverna hangover. It is the second day of a ten-day island-hopping trip, and the holiday’s carefully agreed Rules of Engagement are still holding.

This bright setting gives the weather saying a different force from its earlier conversation. In the first exchange, the proverb is explained through a grave outside Winchester Cathedral; on the holiday, the relevant day is defined by open sky, sun and a slow ferry crossing. The traditional forecast has no visible fulfilment here. Instead, the date connects the scenes, allowing the novel to bring an earlier conversational detail back into a changed landscape and circumstance.

Conversational and Narrative Function

The rhyme is both a fragment of folk belief and a device for showing how Emma and Dexter talk together. Emma challenges the saying’s logic, Dexter supplies its local detail, and her praise of the verse draws out his admission that he has improvised it. The exchange moves through questioning, explanation, mock-poetic performance and correction; its humor depends on the gap between the rhyme’s air of tradition and the speaker’s frank paraphrase.

The later sunny-day scene gives that small exchange a quiet recurrence rather than turning the superstition into a plot-driving prediction. The weather proverb concerns rain, but its return accompanies a holiday in which Emma and Dexter have set boundaries to keep things from becoming complicated. The contrast is suggestive without making the rhyme itself a rule for their relationship: the saying offers an inherited, uncertain forecast, while their holiday rules are a deliberate agreement. Across both appearances, St Swithin’s Day supplies a recognizable verbal and temporal link, moving from a teasing explanation to a sunlit scene where the rain never arrives.