Soft Rains

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains

There Will Come Soft Rains
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the poem by Sara Teasdale. For the Ray Bradbury short story, see There Will Come Soft Rains (short story).

"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 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.

The text above is based on the poem as it appears in Teasdale's 1920 collection Flame and Shadow. The original 1918 publication in Harper's Magazine includes slight differences: "swallows calling" / "wild-plum trees" / "bird nor tree," (added comma).
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.[3]

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).