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.
First published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (July 1918) and collected, with the subtitle “War Time,” in Flame and Shadow (1920). Public domain.
On This Page: Summary · Analysis and Themes · Form and Structure · Historical Context · In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is a twelve-line lyric in which Teasdale pictures the natural world going on exactly as it always has — rain, swallows, frogs, plum blossom, robins — and then quietly observes that none of it would register the absence of humankind. The first six lines build an unhurried catalogue of spring; the last six turn that beauty into a verdict. The war ends, mankind perishes, and the season wakes at dawn without noticing the difference.
Analysis and Themes
The poem’s power comes from the gap between its gentle surface and its merciless conclusion. Teasdale never raises her voice; she lets the loveliness of the imagery do the work of the argument, so that the bleakness arrives almost as an afterthought — and lands all the harder for it.
Nature’s Indifference
Every image in the opening lines is self-sufficient. The swallows circle for their own pleasure, the frogs sing to the night, the plum trees bloom whether or not anyone is there to see them. Teasdale’s nature owes humanity nothing and notices nothing. When she writes that not one creature “would mind, neither bird nor tree, / If mankind perished utterly,” the indifference is complete — and, oddly, more consoling than cruel.
The Quiet Anti-War Argument
The subtitle Teasdale later added, “War Time,” anchors the poem to World War I, the first fully industrial war. Yet the poem refuses every convention of war poetry. There are no trenches, no bodies, no rhetoric of sacrifice or blame. The war appears only as something that will be “done” — a human episode the world will outlast. By shrinking the conflict to a footnote in the larger life of the planet, Teasdale delivers a more unsettling pacifism than any battlefield description could.
Mortality and the Scale of Spring
The final couplet is the poem’s masterstroke. Spring is personified as a sleeper who “scarcely” knows we were gone — not grieving, not even fully aware. Human extinction is reduced to a fact too small to wake her. The line falls so softly that its desolation can take a second reading to register, which is precisely the effect Teasdale is after.
Form and Structure
The poem’s craft is as restrained as its argument. Teasdale writes in six rhymed couplets, in a loose tetrameter that gives the lines a song-like, almost nursery-rhyme simplicity. The tidy AABB rhyme scheme mirrors the cyclical, dependable rhythm of the seasons she describes. That formal neatness is part of the meaning: the couplets keep turning over like the years, untroubled by the human catastrophe folded into the middle of the poem.
Historical Context
The poem sits at the intersection of two catastrophes. Teasdale wrote it in 1918, as the German Spring Offensive raged and the influenza pandemic swept across a war-weary world. It appeared first in Harper’s that July, then in Flame and Shadow in 1920, where it opened a sequence of poems on wartime loss. Teasdale, an American lyric poet who had won an early poetry prize for her 1917 collection Love Songs — a forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry — was writing a continent away from the front, and the poem’s detachment reflects that distance, a remove that widens in the verse from geographic to cosmic.
In Popular Culture
The poem’s reach extends well beyond its own war:
Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes its title from Teasdale’s poem and quotes it in full. In the story — collected in The Martian Chronicles — an automated house keeps running its daily routines after a nuclear war has killed the family it served, and one evening recites the Teasdale poem to an empty room. It is a haunting echo of the original’s vision of a world carrying on, indifferent, after humanity destroys itself.
Related Poems
If this poem stays with you, these explore kindred ground:
- Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Human power and ambition reduced to ruins by the indifferent passage of time — the same humbling Teasdale’s spring performs.
- Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen: The visceral, battlefield counterpart to Teasdale’s quiet detachment, confronting the horror of the same war head-on.
- The Soldier by Rupert Brooke: A WWI lyric that, unlike Teasdale’s, finds consolation and idealism in dying for one’s country.
- Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost: A spare meditation on nature’s cycles and the impermanence woven into beauty itself.