There Will Come Soft Rains
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a 12-line poem by Sara Teasdale in her collection Flame and Shadow, published in 1920 (see 1920 in poetry). The poem imagines nature reclaiming a battlefield after the fighting is finished. The poem also alludes to the idea of human extinction by war (lines 10 and 12), which was not a commonplace idea until the invention of nuclear weapons, 25 years later. The poem reads:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
The poem has six stanzas, each made up of a rhyming couplet.
The poem is also notably featured in the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name.
See also
- The World Without Us
- Life After People
- Aftermath: Population Zero
- There Will Come Soft Rains (short story)
External links
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There Will Come Soft Rains public domain audiobook at LibriVox