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This passage is from a short story, "Home", by Gwendolyn Brooks.

She knew, from the way they looked at her, that this had been a mistake. They did not want to cry.

But she felt that the little line of white, sometimes ridged with smoked purple, and all that cream-shot saffron would never drift across any western sky except that in back of this house. The rain would drum with as sweet a dullness nowhere but here. The birds on South Park were mechanical birds, no better than the poor caught canaries in those “rich” women’s sun parlors

Does "The rain would drum with as sweet a dullness nowhere but here" mean that the sound of rain anywhere but here is sad?

What is the meaning of "cream-shot saffron"? Is it just a metaphor? I don't know what is like "cream-shot saffron".

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The rain would drum with as sweet a dullness nowhere but here.

This basically means "The rain would not (do something) anywhere else." In this case, what the rain does is "drum with a sweet dullness" so the whole sentence basically means "The rain would not drum with a sweet dullness anywhere else."

But she felt that the little line of white, sometimes ridged with smoked purple, and all that cream-shot saffron would never drift across any western sky except that in back of this house.

She is describing the colors of the sky, and saffron is a color. Shot means "suffused or streaked with a color", so "cream-shot" means "suffused or streaked with cream", and "cream-shot saffron" means "saffron color that is suffused or streaked with cream color".

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In other words: It was the only place where the dull sound of drumming rain could feel so sweet.

Cream-shot is a shape of some cloud in the sky and saffron is its color.

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  • I agree on the "dull sound of drumming" and completely disagree about "cream-shot saffron". In "all that cream-shot saffron" the noun is clearly saffron and cream-shot is an adjective describing it. It is "saffron that has had cream added to it."
    – stangdon
    Sep 15, 2018 at 12:31
  • Cream-shot is not being used to draw a parallel with the pornographic sense of that expression in this context. Even if it was, you shouldn’t tell people to Google something that is likely to turn up offensive content without warning them.
    – ColleenV
    Sep 20, 2018 at 17:11

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