There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale
Quick answer: There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale analysed: how six couplets imagine nature after human extinction, and what war poets can learn from its restraint.
Sara Teasdale published There Will Come Soft Rains in 1918, while the First World War was still killing men by the tens of thousands and the influenza pandemic was gathering. The poem contains no trenches, no soldiers, no flags. Instead it offers twelve lines of springtime, rain, swallows, frogs, wild plum trees, robins, and then quietly mentions that none of these things would notice if the war ended, or if mankind 'perished utterly'. Spring herself, waking at dawn, would scarcely know that we were gone.
It is one of the most chilling war poems in English precisely because it refuses to look at the war. Ray Bradbury borrowed its title and its premise for his famous story about an automated house outliving its family, which has kept the poem in front of new readers for a century.
What the poem says
The first four couplets are pure pastoral prophecy: there will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, swallows circling with their shimmering sound, frogs singing in the pools at night, wild plum trees in tremulous white, robins wearing their feathery fire and whistling on a low fence-wire. Every image is small, seasonal and self-sufficient. Nothing in these lines needs a human observer.
The fifth couplet detonates the poem: not one of these creatures will know of the war, not one will care when it is finished at last. The sixth goes further still, into extinction. Neither bird nor tree would mind if mankind perished completely, and Spring, personified for the first time as a woman waking at dawn, would scarcely know that we were gone. The poem's subtitle in its collected form, War Time, is the only stage direction the reader gets.
How it works
The form is six rhymed couplets in a loose, mostly anapaestic four-beat line, a lilting, songlike movement that belongs to nursery verse and lullaby. That prettiness is a weapon. The metre keeps rocking gently while the content moves from birdsong to the erasure of the species, and the gap between the two produces the poem's distinctive cold shiver.
Structure does the arguing. Eight lines of accumulating natural detail establish a world; four lines withdraw humanity from it and show that the world holds. The word choices in the pastoral section are worth study, 'shimmering', 'tremulous', 'feathery fire', because their delicacy proves the speaker loves what she describes. This is not misanthropy scoring points. It is tenderness taking the measure of our unimportance.
Why it lasts
Most war poetry protests by showing horror. Teasdale protests by showing indifference, and indifference has aged better than shrapnel. The poem read one way in 1918, another after Hiroshima, another again in an era of climate anxiety, and its central perception, that nature is not our audience, keeps finding new applications. Its brevity helps too: twelve memorisable lines, one irreversible turn, no wasted word.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the absent subject. Write about a catastrophe by describing only what would continue without you: the bus route, the birdsong, the neighbour's radio. The reader supplies the grief, which makes it theirs.
Steal the weaponised pretty metre. Setting dark material to light, regular music creates an irony no amount of shouting can match. If you enter work like this in a contest, Writory's judges score theme and emotion separately, and this poem is a model of how one quiet turn can carry both.
What poets can take from this
- Write about disaster by listing what will not notice it; keep every image small and alive.
- Set grim content in a gentle, songlike metre and let the mismatch do the work.
- Hold your turn until two-thirds through, then make it total and irreversible.
- Personify one force of nature only, and only at the end, for maximum effect.
- Use a subtitle or date to supply context instead of explaining it inside the poem.
Try it yourself
Write a twelve-line poem in couplets describing a place you love exactly as it will be one hundred years after the last person leaves it, without using the words death, war or gone until the final couplet.
Questions
What is the theme of There Will Come Soft Rains?
The poem's theme is nature's indifference to human conflict and even human extinction. Written during the First World War, it imagines spring continuing beautifully after mankind has perished, as a quiet rebuke to human self-importance and violence.
Is There Will Come Soft Rains about World War One?
Yes. Teasdale published it in 1918 and grouped it under the heading War Time. The war is mentioned only once, which is the point: the creatures of spring neither know nor care about it.
How is the poem connected to Ray Bradbury?
Ray Bradbury took the title and premise for his 1950 story There Will Come Soft Rains, in which an automated house continues its routines after a nuclear blast has killed its family. The story quotes Teasdale's poem directly.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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