Sara Teasdale: There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

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.

Public Domain

“There Will Come Soft Rains” was published just after the start of the 1918 German Spring Offensive during World War I, and during the 1918 flu pandemic about nature’s establishment of a new peaceful order that will be indifferent to the outcome of the war or mankind’s extinction. The work was first published in the July 1918 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and later revised and provided with the subtitle “War Time” in her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow. Ray Bradbury borrowed the title “There Will Come Soft Rains” for his 1950 short story about the after-effects of nuclear war.

Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933) was an American lyric poet.  In 1918, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs.