Home > There Will Come Soft Rains Summary & Study Guide

There Will Come Soft Rains | Introduction

In 1950, noted science fiction writer Ray Bradbury published his popular collection of futuristic short stories called The Martian Chronicles. That book contains a story called “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and it is not by accident that the title is the same as Sara Teasdale’s poem published in Flame and Shadow thirty years earlier, in 1920, by MacMillan. Bradbury borrowed the name directly from the poet’s work and based his story on a theme similar to the poem’s, the senseless destruction of humankind by their own hands through war. In the story, a talking house is left confused and devastated by the loss of its masters, who vanished in an atomic blast. At one point, the house, lonely for its mistress, reads aloud one of the dead woman’s favorite poems—“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale.

Teasdale’s poem is a response to her disdain for and disillusionment over World War I. When the United States became involved in the conflict, Teasdale turned some of her creative attention to writing anti-war lyrics, and when this poem appeared in Flame and Shadow, it carried the subtitle “War Time.” The poem addresses the atrocity of battle from the perspective of nature—of birds and frogs and trees whose lives will go on even if human beings obliterate themselves from the planet. It is interesting to note that in Bradbury’s short story based on the poem, nature and nonhuman objects do not fare quite as well, eventually succumbing to their own deaths without people around to support them. But Teasdale takes perhaps a more cynical approach in that nature will not only endure but will carry on without even noticing “that we were gone.”

There Will Come Soft Rains Summary

Lines 1–2
The verb phrase “will come” in both the title and the first line of “There Will Come Soft Rains” indicates that the poem takes place in the future, but whether the future is an hour away, a day away, or many years away is not clear. Not until the end of the poem is there an implication that the time the poem looks forward to is actually a season away—a time when spring comes around again. The “soft rains” are the gentle showers of springtime that dampen the ground and bring out its earthy scents of wet grass and mud. Spring also means the return of birds, and “swallows” are a good choice to describe as making a “shimmering sound” because of their graceful, swift movements in the air.... » Complete There Will Come Soft Rains Summary