"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a 12-line poem by Sara Teasdale in her collection Flame and Shadow, published in 1920 (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 commonplace idea until the invention of nuclear weapons, 25 years later.
Contents
Text
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.
The poem has six stanzas, each made up of a rhyming couplet.
Influence
The poem is quoted, (lines 10 and 12) by the main character, in the 2016 film The Forest.
The poem is also notably featured in the Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name.
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 Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg used a Russian translation of the poem for the 3rd movement of his Requiem Op.96 (1967).