There Will Come Soft Rains
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a 12-line poem by Sara Teasdale. The work was first published in the July 1918 issue of Harper's Magazine,[1] and later included in her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow[2] (see 1920 in poetry). 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.
Text
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows calling 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 in irregular tetrameters.
Influence
- The poem is quoted, (lines 10 and 12) by the main character, in the 2016 film The Forest.
- The poem is also featured in Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name.[3]
- The poem featured in a radio adaptation of the Ray Bradbury Story, as "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains", which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 11 May 1977[4]. The adaptation, for "Narrator, Vocoder and Synthesizer" was by Malcolm Clarke (composer) of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
- 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.
- The Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg used a Russian translation of the poem for the 3rd movement of his Requiem Op. 96 (1967).
- The Irish musician Tony Wright (VerseChorusVerse) used the poem as lyrics for a song of the same name. It was released as part of a double A side charity single for Help Musicians UK. [5]
- The Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds used the poem as lyrics for a song of the same name. The Pacific Lutheran Choir of the West released a recording of it on their album, also of the same name, of works by Ēriks Ešenvalds.[6]
See also
- The World Without Us
- Life After People
- Aftermath: Population Zero
- Zone Rouge: Former World War I battlefields reclaimed by nature
References
- Harper's Magazine, vol. CXXXVII, p. 238 (July 1918), 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)
- Conversations with Ray Bradbury Ray Bradbury, Steven L. Aggelis, 2004, p. 107 1578066417 "The one that comes to mind first is 'There Will Come Soft Rains,' which is about a house in the future that goes on living after the city is destroyed"
- Genome BETA Radio Times 1923 - 2009. August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains. Available at genome.ch.bbc.co.uk (visited 05 April 2020)
- "STREAM: VERSECHORUSVERSE – HOLD ON (A SUBTLE ACT OF REBELLION)/THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS". Retrieved March 28, 2020.
- "There Will Come Soft Rains". YouTube. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
External links
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