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:

Text

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.

Influence

The poem is also notably featured in the Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name.^[1] Following this in the video game Fallout 3, a Mister Handy Robot recites this poem for the long dead children of the family he belonged to.

The Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg used a Russian translation of the poem for the 3rd movement of his Requiem Op.96 (1967).

See also

• The World Without Us
• Life After People
• Aftermath: Population Zero
• There Will Come Soft Rains (short story)

References

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: There Will Come Soft Rains

There Will Come Soft Rains public domain audiobook at LibriVox