There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury
Quick answer: There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury: summary with the ending, the empty house in Allendale, the silhouettes on the wall, the Teasdale poem, and its themes.
In a house in Allendale, California, a voice-clock tells the family to get up, and breakfast cooks itself for four people who are no longer there. Ray Bradbury published There Will Come Soft Rains in Collier's in May 1950 and placed it near the end of The Martian Chronicles the same year.
It is one of the most assigned science fiction stories in American middle and high schools, a story with no living human character in it.
The story in brief, ending included
The house runs its morning: the stove makes eggs and toast, tiny cleaning mice sweep the floors, the garage door opens for a car that never leaves. Outside, the city is rubble and ash, and the house stands alone. Its west face is charred black except for five pale spots: a man mowing, a woman bending to pick flowers, a boy and a girl with their hands raised, and the ball they were throwing, all burned into the paint at the instant of the flash.
The family dog, thin and sore-covered, gets in, sniffs for its people, and dies; the mice carry it to the incinerator. Bridge tables unfold, the nursery hour projects its animals, and in the evening the house asks Mrs McClellan which poem she would like and, unanswered, reads her favourite: Sara Teasdale's 1918 lyric about a spring that would not notice if mankind perished. Wind rises, a bough smashes the kitchen window, cleaning solvent spills on the stove, and fire takes the house room by room while it fights with water and foam and loses. At dawn one wall stands, a voice inside it repeating the new day's date.
The characters
No people survive to be characters.
Themes: technology outliving its makers
The classroom readings are nuclear anxiety in 1950, nature's indifference to human extinction (the poem's argument), and convenience with nobody left to serve. The house is faithful, not evil, which is sadder.
The sharper observation is the story's use of schedule as grief. Every timed announcement, breakfast, bridge, nursery hour, poem, is a small memorial to a habit, and the reader mourns the family by attending their routine.
The craft: a plot with no protagonist and a clock
The opening promises a domestic morning and gives the time as a refrain; the announcements are the story's skeleton, and the disaster is disclosed sideways through the wall's silhouettes. The turn is the dog's death, when the story admits that something alive can still be lost here. The fire is the pay-off: a house that could do everything for people can do nothing for itself.
The technique to steal is the timetable as structure: the reader learns the catastrophe from what the schedule no longer serves. A day told by its hours is the kind of disciplined shape that scores on Structure in any judged contest, Writory's included.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, cite the five silhouettes as the story's only human portrait.
- Explain how the Teasdale poem states the theme and how the fire enacts it.
- Use the dog's death as the emotional turn.
- Writers: let a timetable carry exposition; the reader learns the loss from what the schedule no longer serves.
- Personify a setting through habit, not through speech.
Try it yourself
Write a story that follows a place through one full day by its scheduled events, with the people it was built for absent for reasons you reveal only through one physical trace. Allow one living creature to enter and leave. End with the schedule continuing past the point where anything is left to serve.
Questions
What is the theme of There Will Come Soft Rains?
The indifference of nature and of our own devices to human extinction. A self-running house keeps its routine after a nuclear flash has killed its family, and the poem it reads says spring would not notice we were gone.
What do the silhouettes on the wall mean?
They are the family's shadows burned into the paint at the instant of the blast: a man mowing, a woman picking flowers, two children and a ball. They are the only picture of the McClellans the story gives.
Why does the house burn down at the end?
A falling tree bough breaks the kitchen window, spilling cleaning solvent onto the stove. The house fights the fire with water and foam, runs dry, and collapses, leaving one wall repeating the date.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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