Sara Teasdale

There Will Come Soft Rains

"THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS"
(War Time)

Nature's indifference

Teasdale lists six specific natural details (soft rains, swallows, frogs, plum-trees, robins, fence-wire) before revealing her argument. The concrete imagery makes the abstraction hit harder.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

Nature's indifference

Teasdale lists six specific natural details (soft rains, swallows, frogs, plum-trees, robins, fence-wire) before revealing her argument. The concrete imagery makes the abstraction hit harder.

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;

The turn: 'not one will know'

Line 7 pivots from description to judgment. The repetition of 'not one' emphasizes that nature operates in complete ignorance of human warfare—a radical claim about nature's autonomy.

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;

Mankind as disposable

The word 'utterly' is key—not partial harm, but complete extinction. Teasdale's speaker suggests the earth wouldn't register human absence at all, which is a harsh inversion of human importance.

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Spring as final judge

Personifying Spring as waking and observing creates a cosmic perspective. 'Scarcely know' suggests not even a pause—the planet's renewal would continue uninterrupted without us.

Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Source

Reading Notes

Written during WWI—a poem about human irrelevance

CONTEXT Teasdale published this in 1915, two years after the start of World War I. The subtitle "(War Time)" is crucial—she's not writing a timeless nature poem, but a specific response to industrial-scale killing.

The poem's argument is deliberately deflating: humans wage total war, but nature doesn't care. This wasn't comforting to her contemporaries—it was unsettling. By listing six beautiful natural details before revealing her thesis, Teasdale forces readers to feel the indifference firsthand. We're invited into the natural world's perspective, then told we don't matter to it.

The genius move is the final stanza. Instead of ending with human extinction, she ends with Spring's awakening—suggesting renewal will happen regardless of whether we survive. This isn't hopeful about humanity; it's hopeful about the world continuing without us.

Technique: Why she uses future tense and negation

Notice the structure: "There will come" + six concrete images, then "And not one will know" + three negations. Teasdale builds certainty through repetition. By using future tense (will come, will know, would mind), she makes indifference feel inevitable, not accidental.

The negations are doing real work. "Not one will know," "not one / Will care," "Not one would mind," "neither bird nor tree"—she's erasing human significance by what nature *won't* do. This is more effective than saying "nature ignores war." The repeated denials accumulate into a crushing argument. The poem's form (closed rhymed couplets) gives it a neat, logical structure that makes the bleak argument feel airtight.