There Will Come Soft Rain By Sara Teasdale
There will come soft rain 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.
There Will Come Soft Rains is a 12-line poem by Sara Teasdale written in 1920. The subject of the poem imagines nature reclaiming the earth after humanity has been wiped out by a war (line 7). The voice of the poem speaks definitely, the way in which the poet imagines how little the human race will be missed is an absolute certainty and not just a possibility.
Sara Teasdale 1920
In 1950, noted science fiction writer Ray Bradbury published his popular collection of futuristic short stories called The Martian Chronicles. That book contains a story called “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and it is not by accident that the title is the same as Sara Teasdale’s poem published in Flame and Shadow thirty years earlier, in 1920, by MacMillan. Bradbury borrowed the name directly from the poet’s work and based his story on a theme similar to the poem’s, the senseless destruction of humankind by their own hands through war. In the story, a talking house is left confused and devastated by the loss of its masters, who vanished in an atomic blast. At one point, the house, lonely for its mistress, reads aloud one of the dead woman’s favorite poems — “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale.
Teasdale’s poem is a response to her disdain for and disillusionment over World War I. When the United States became involved in the conflict, Teasdale turned some of her creative attention to writing anti-war lyrics, and when this poem appeared in Flame and Shadow, it carried the subtitle “War Time.” The poem addresses the atrocity of battle from the perspective of nature — of birds and frogs and trees whose lives will go on even if human beings obliterate themselves from the planet. It is interesting to note that in Bradbury’s short story based on the poem, nature and non-human objects do not fare quite as well, eventually succumbing to their own deaths without people around to support them. But Teasdale takes perhaps a more cynical approach in that nature will not only endure but will carry on without even noticing “that we were gone.”
STYLE: The poem has six stanzas, each made up of a rhyming couplet. The rhythm of the poem is close to iambic pentameter but each line deviates from this slightly; the one line which maintains iambic pentameter is line 7 'And not one will know of the war, not one' notably the first two syllables of the next line have been included here, also suggesting that the poet has intentionally included them to complete the metre. It might be proposed that the rest of the poem has been written close to iambic meter reflects the world of the poem is one where the remains of human existence are dissipating; for example the robins are 'on a low fence-wire' suggesting it has either fallen over or begun to sink into the ground which no longer belongs to the human race.
The imagery in the poem is also dreamlike; for example the idiosyncratic use of the adjective 'shimmering' in the second line to describe sound rather than light, and the phrase 'wild plum trees in tremulous white' makes the image seem ambiguous and hard to imagine, as plum trees are not white (plum tree blossoms are however white, so it seems rather likely that this refers to a blooming plum tree in spring) and 'tremulous' suggests a kind of shaking movement which we would not normally associate with trees (probably tremulous is used in a figurative manner here, as for example 'a tremor of excitement went through the audience', so it is simply used to describe a feeling associated with the vision of a plum tree in full bloom).
The use of metaphor in the poem to further illustrate the image of the robins wearing 'their feathery fire' implies the idea not just of the colour of the feathers but also how warm they keep the birds. The robins are also personified; their birdsong is described as 'whims', which contrasts them with the swallows whose appearance, despite the unusual way their sound is described, is far more naturalistic. This draws attention to them and perhaps suggests they are emblematic of something more than birds which have outlived humanity; they are perhaps a symbol of the leaders who have led humanity to its destruction. The poet also places them on a fence rather than a more organic perch, further connecting them with humans rather than the natural world. Some have suggested substituting on a low fence-wire with over a glowing myre to eliminate this connotation.
Style
Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry is poetry that expresses subjective thoughts and feelings in a songlike style, often using both rhythm and rhyme. It is not a coincidence that people who write words to songs are writing “lyrics,” but lyric poetry does not necessarily imply a simple, unsophisticated style that must appeal to a mass audience to be considered popular. Truly, many of Teasdale’s poems were set to music, especially the early ones in which the themes were lighter and more concerned with love and relationships than depression and war. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is lyrical and the couplets do rhyme, but its dark, cynical subject keeps the poem from falling into a simplistic, naïve category that describes some short, rhyming poems.
The obvious end-rhyming of the lines in this poem is offset by very effective alliteration within the lines. Alliteration is a poetic device used to emphasize the sound of a poem or the way individual words work together to create interesting patterns of repetition. There are two types of alliteration: consonance, which means a repetition of like-sounding vowels. Notice the s sound in the first couplet, using the words “soft,” “smell,” “swallows,” “circling,” “shimmering,” and “sound.” In only two lines, Teasdale manages to use six words alliteratively without lapsing into overdone poetics or forced intonation. The third couplet also employs very impressive consonance with the w sound. The words “will,” “wear,” “whistling,” “whims,” and “wire” are, again, effective without being trite. Although “There Will Come Soft Rains” does not contain as much assonance as consonance, there is one example of the repetition of the long-i vowel sound in lines 3 and 4 in the words “night,” “wild,” and “white.”
The rhythm of lyric poetry derives from its methodic use of meter throughout. In this poem, each line in the first couplet contains eleven syllables, each line in the second couplet contains nine syllables, as do those in the third, and so forth. The final three couplets have differing syllable counts within their lines, but lines 8 – 12 follow an 8, 9, 8, 9, 8 syllabic pattern. But in spite of Teasdale’s careful attention to poetic style, “There Will Come Soft Rains” is stronger in its meaning than in its form. This helps to make the poem more appealing, as well as more credible, to readers.
Poem Summary
Lines 1 – 2
The verb phrase “will come” in both the title and the first line of “There Will Come Soft Rains” indicates that the poem takes place in the future, but whether the future is an hour away, a day away, or many years away is not clear. Not until the end of the poem is there an implication that the time the poem looks forward to is actually a season away — a time when spring comes around again. The “soft rains” are the gentle showers of springtime that dampen the ground and bring out its earthy scents of wet grass and mud. Spring also means the return of birds, and “swallows” are a good choice to describe as making a “shimmering sound” because of their graceful, swift movements in the air.
Lines 3 – 4
Lines 3 and 4 introduce more elements of nature in the form of frogs, pools, and plum trees. The frogs are depicted “singing at night” to show their nonchalance toward the world around them. They go about their merry business completely oblivious to what is happening in the human world, which is not revealed until line 7. The plum trees are “wild,” implying carefree and natural, but they are also “tremulous,” or fearful and timid. The latter description is a foreshadowing of the revelation of war and death in the poem. Although the animals and plants are safe from the madness of humankind, they still reflect the fear and insecurity that people have brought into the environment.
Lines 5 – 6
Line 5 also contains a foreshadowing image, as the robins are wearing “their feathery fire.” While the reddish orange color of robins’ breasts may resemble the color of fire, there is likely more to the word choice here than an attempt to match hues. Fire is a part of war. Whether it refers to gunfire itself or to actual fires that often result from hand grenades, cannon balls, or bombs, the intention is to portray the beauty and peacefulness of nature against the horrific imagery of battle. Line 6 reinforces the idea of innocent animals’ playfulness and nonchalance amidst human chaos. The robins sit on a fence wire “Whistling their whims” because they do not have the same worries and fears that humans do.
Lines 7 – 8
Here, the poem reveals its theme. Lines 7 and 8 make an abrupt change in the tone and subject matter, shifting from pastoral scenes of animals enjoying a spring day to the recognition of a war going on. These lines also explain why the poet has been so careful to portray the wild life as completely happy and carefree. Showing them circling and singing and whistling drives home even harder Teasdale’s contention that the natural world is not as foolish as the human world has become. Blissfully ignorant of the destruction and devastation the humans are suffering, the animals do not “know of the war” and “not one / Will care” what the outcome is, for the swallows, frogs, robins, and so forth will remain unaffected.
Lines 9 – 10
These two lines are perhaps the most dismal in the poem and the most revealing of the poet’s true disdain for the act of war. Although there were no atomic or hydrogen bombs used in World War I — the only world war Teasdale lived through — she still seems to recognize the possibility of mankind’s total self-annihilation through large-scale violence and bloodshed. The phrase, “If mankind perished utterly,” parallels the theme of much of the science fiction stories and novels that would become popular over the decades after the poem was published. Teasdale would be long dead before Ray Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles and before World War II would end with the U.S. obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. But the ability to destroy places and people “utterly” is obviously something she could foresee and chose to warn against in her poetry.
Lines 11 – 12
Line 11 now reveals the time in the future when the soft rains will come. “Spring herself” will show no more concern for human war than do the birds, frogs, and trees. Instead, when the season arrives again, it will not even notice that mankind is no longer around.
Themes
Death and Meaninglessness
World War I brought an entirely new meaning to the idea of conflicts between nations. While thousands of patriots from each of the countries involved went eagerly and confidently into battle, thousands more were shocked by the massive undertaking, never before having witnessed such large-scale political participation in warfare. For many, that shock led to disillusionment with their own governments and depression over the loss of so many young men who fought and died without fully understanding why they were fighting and for whom they were dying. Sara Teasdale was one of the latter.
For years, the poet had used her creativity to write love poems. Her style was simple, elegant, and innocent, expressing feminine sensitivity to romantic relationships, marriage, loss of love, and the beauty of finding it again. Addressing the brutality of physical battle and warring nations did not enter her work until her own emotional response to World War I forced her into it. This was new territory for Teasdale, but she ventured into it with the same simple yet imposing style, changing only her themes to reflect the dark mood and nagging fear that plagued her own mind and her environment. Suddenly, life seemed meaningless. With so many people willing to take up arms and march into strange lands ready to kill or be killed, Teas-dale found it difficult to maintain any sense of decency or order in the world, to hold onto a belief in a gentle andpeaceful human nature. Both her anger and pessimism are evident in “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
The first half of the poem — with its pastoral scenes and pretty depiction of animals and trees in their natural states — is a set-up for the second half when suddenly the tone turns bitter, admonishing mankind’s absurd and chaotic behavior. The total disappearance of human beings from the earth is not as far-fetched an idea as it once may have been, and “If mankind perished utterly,” it would be by his own hands, a notion the poet believes is evidence of the meaninglessness and disorder in human life. Death is no longer personal and tragic, but impersonal and cursory. A war between several different nations implies dubious reasoning and reckless action, leaving little room to be passionate about life or show respect for individuals. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a poem that calls out for orderly design and meaning in everyday living, but in this work, only the animals and trees can answer the call.
Detachment
Many writers who address the issue of war and all of its results include the obvious destruction of property and loss of human life as well as the sometimes neglected mention of harm done to wildlife and the natural environment. Novels, short stories, and poems typically portray flora and fauna as helpless, unavoidable bystanders during battle, victims of violence among people and incapable of getting out of the way. Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” puts a different spin on the role of nature during wartime, affording it not only the ability to stay alive but to distance itself distinctly and nonchalantly from the entire debacle.
The first six lines of the poem may appear innocent and even childlike in their description of birds and frogs going happily about their day, which consists of sailing through the air, singing by the waterside, and whiling away time on a fence wire, whistling a tune. But the simplicity is both intentional and powerful in providing a foundation for the comparison Teasdale eventually makes between man and nature — man, violent and foolish; nature, beautiful and content. Neither animals nor “wild plum-trees” will fall victim to human violence, for they can and do remain detached from it all. So the first half of the poem illustrates an especially peaceful day among wildlife to make a more compelling, stark contrast to human behavior.
The indifference of nature to mankind’s self-destruction is a theme borne out of disgust with the human race as well as disappointment. Teasdale’s well-documented pacifism made her particularly vulnerable to the human tendency to settle disagreements through physical combat, and she was both hurt by it and angered. This poem conveys a point that Teasdale made regularly in her war poetry — that while human beings may destroy themselves one day, nature will prevail. In a poem also included in Flame and Shadow called “In a Garden,” she describes the peaceful beauty of apple trees, purple phlox, asters, and roses all offset by the hysteria of a regiment of soldiers suddenly marching nearby. The poem ends with much the same sentiment as “There Will Come Soft Rains,” its final line declaring: “Earth takes her children’s many sorrows calmly / And stills herself to sleep.”
