There Will Come Soft Rains - Sara Teasdale
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a poem by American poet Sara Teasdale, originally published in 1918.
There Will Come Soft Rains[]
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.
Background[]
There will come soft rains (The world without us)
The work was originally published in the July 1918 issue of Harper's Magazine,[1] and later included in Teasdale's 1920 collection Flame and Shadow.[2]
The poem is about the indifference of nature (and nature's God) to humanity.
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. [3]
Recognition[]
In popular culture[]
The poem is best known for a story, also called "There Will Come Soft Rains," by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, published in the May 6, 1950 issue of Collier's. Later that same year the story was included in Bradbury's 1951 collection The Martian Chronicles. The story begins by describing a computer-controlled house that cooks, cleans and takes care of virtually every need that a well-to-do modern family could be assumed to have. At first, it is not apparent that anything is out of the ordinary, but eventually it becomes clear that the residents of the house are not present and that the house is empty. While no direct explanation of the nonexistence of the family is produced, the silhouettes of a man, a woman, two children, and their play ball are described as having been burnt into one side of the house, implying that they were all incinerated by the thermal flash of a nuclear weapon. The house is then described as standing amidst the ruins of a city; the leveled urban area is described briefly as emitting a "radioactive glow".[4] The house is the only thing left standing and continues to perform its duties.[5] Teasdale's poem is quoted in full in the story.
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 robot itself carrying out its daily routine as in the Bradbury story.[3]
Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg used a Russian translation of the poem for the 3rd movement of his Requiem Op.96 (1967).[3]
Lines 10 and 12 of the poem are quoted by the main character in the 2016 film The Forest.[3]
See also[]
References[]
- ↑ Harper's Magazine, vol. CXXXVII (July 1918), , 238 available at HathiTrust (visited July 29, 2017) or harpers.org (visited July 29, 2017, login required).
- ↑ Macmillan 1920, pp. 89-90, available at Google Books (visited July 29, 2017)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 There Will Come Soft Rains, Wikipedia, March 13, 2018. Web, Mar. 17, 2018.
- ↑ Bradbury, Ray. "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains." The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2011. 116-121. Print.
- ↑ There Will Come Soft Rains (short story), Wikipedia, February 12, 2018. Web, Mar. 17, 2018.
External links[]
- Audio / video
This poem is in the public domain