Ray Bradbury

There Will Come Soft Rains

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

" There Will Come Soft Rains" is a 12-line poem by Sara Teasdale in her collection Flame and Shadow, published in 1920. 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.