There Will Come Soft Rains

The message behind Sara Teasdale's poem "There Will Come Soft Rains," which is quoted in Ray Bradbury's short story of the same name, can be summed up in the following lines: And not one will know...

Personification refers to the ascribing of human characteristics on non-human objects. Given that Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is centered around an automated house as its main...

Personification is a form of figurative language in which an author attributes human qualities to something that is not human. There is a great deal of personification in Ray Bradbury's short story...

The house is compared to an altar, and the house itself is a metaphor for the dangers of over-relying on technology. A metaphor is a common type of figurative language where something is referred...

When it comes to Ray Bradbury’s eerie short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” there’s an abundance of imagery to discuss. In the first paragraph, imagery can be found in the sentence “The morning...

The very fact that Bradbury's story takes its title from Teasdale's poem serves as a powerful confirmation that the story is very much in conversation with it. Indeed, not only does Bradbury...

The final showdown, so to speak, between the mechanized house and the casual act of nature symbolizes the fact that nature is, without even trying to be, far more powerful than anything human...

One prominent literary device that Bradbury uses in “There Will Come Soft Rains” is symbolism. For example, consider how the dog who dies from radiation poisoning was once “huge and fleshy” and is...

The house left standing after a nuclear war symbolizes the human worship of technology. In the story, the house is pictured as a god. For example, Bradbury writes: The house was an altar with ten...

The biggest irony in “There Will Come Soft Rains” is that technology is supposed to make life easier for people, yet it has led to the destruction of the human race. The automated home demonstrates...

On the broadest level, the main conflict of the story is human technology versus nature, but this can be understood more specifically as human pride coming into conflict with the natural world. The...

In Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains," the completely automated smart home is the only structure still standing in the middle of a nuclear wasteland in Allendale, California....

In "There Will Come Soft Rains," the dog survives the nuclear blast but later dies of radiation sickness. Its body lies in the parlor for an hour and, by two o'clock, the "regiments" of mechanical...

The west side of the house is burnt black except for five white spots. One of these spots is the silhouette of a woman bending to pick flowers "as in a photograph." Similes most often use "like" or...

The main message of this story could differ from reader to reader, and the story contains multiple themes. Themes can lead readers toward choosing a particular message, but a story's theme and...

The breakfast stove churns out a lovely breakfast for the people who are no longer there, and a while later, it disposes of the food, which has been left uneaten. The narrator says that "hot water...

The spots of paint are all that is left of the people who lived in the house. There are no people alive to tell the story in “There Will Come Soft Rains.” There has been some kind of recent...

In Ray Bradbury's dystopian short story "There Will Come Soft Rains," a single house is left standing in the year 2026, after an atomic blast kills the inhabitants of the house and the rest of the...

I agree with mrs-campbell and would like to expand upon her answer a bit more. I must say that after scouring the story, I could find no new examples of personification because she mentioned them...

As the previous educators have noted, the house is destroyed by a fire after a tree branch goes through the kitchen window, knocking a bottle of cleaning solvent onto the stovetop. What is really...

The author describes the nursery as a place that feels alive with animals and insects and plant life. The floor is woven to feel like a "crisp, cereal meadow," and the walls teem with moving films...

Mood is the emotion caused by reading the poem. A poem might be sad, happy, excited, passionate, or mourning, just like a person. Any mood that a person has can be found in poetry. This little...

Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Veldt," explores the results of parents who spoil their children and rely on technology to take the place of family. In this story, George and Lydia Hadley have...

Bradbury's story is set in an empty house. All the humans who once lived in it have been killed, but the house, which behaves almost as a human character, continues functioning as if the owners are...

Since the story is so short, there isn't much time to slip a whole lot of foreshadowing in, but, Bradbury does manage it. Take a look at the first line. Right in the first line of the story, it...

For approximately the first two-thirds of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," the story is organized chronologically, as the "voice-clock" sings out the time of day. At seven, it is time...

Bradbury personifies the technologically advanced smart home by describing its voice, eyes, and behaviors. The empty automated home is the last remaining house in a city of rubble and ashes...

The rain signifies nature's way or function of cleansing itself. And, following this nuclear explosion and the decimation of the human population, there is the sense that nature is cleansing itself...

Ray Bradbury is known for having a very lyrical writing style, rich with the use of metaphor and poetic turns of phrases. "There Will Come Soft Rains" is no exception to this trend, and the passage...

The family-two parents, a son, and a daughter are dead as a result of an atomic bomb blast. The only thing that remains of them are five splotches against the house. The family dog arrives at the...

In this story, a house goes on functioning for awile and then "dies" in a fire after all the human inhabitants are killed in a nuclear war. Similes likening the house to nature, magic and children...

I would describe the tone of this story as lyrical or poetic. The "soft" in the title indicates this. The lyrical, gentle tone provides an ironic juxtaposition to a story of nuclear destruction....

Although we know that the family plays outside in the yard—as images of them throwing a ball, picking flowers, and otherwise engaging in outdoors activities is etched on the wall of the house after...

The ticking noise represents the technology and the impact it has had on the house as time passes. Something terrible happened in this story that turned the people into nothing but spots in paint....

The house serves to provide friendly reminders that mirror the family's movements throughout the day. First, it provides a welcoming invitation to rise from bed at 7 a.m. A few moments later, it...

I think that what you are asking is whether or not There Will Come Soft Rains has a moral to it? Yes, yes it does! The story by Bradbury as well as the poem by Teasdale (both with the same title)...

Ray Bradbury has taken the title of this story from a poem called "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Sara Teasdale. In her poem, Teasdale creates a peaceful and idyllic world in birds and frogs live...

An allusion is a reference in a piece of literature to another work of writing or to a cultural or historical event. The main allusion is to Sara Teasdale's poem "There Will Come Soft Rains." Part...

In "There Will Come Soft Rains," the house is an unthinking, emotionless machine, so the story's mood stays, for the most part, as being matter-of-fact. However, in the moments leading up to the...

The house was inhabited by a family of four before the nuclear blast killed them. The house in the story is fully automated. Its job is to take care of its family, which consists of a mother, a...

At first glance, Bradbury seems to portray a positive view of the future. In his version of the future, people have an easier life because technology has taken over all of our domestic chores. The...

There are several similarities between the stories “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. First of all, both houses seem to have a creepy nursery that projects pictures and...

The title of Sara Teasdale's poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" symbolically represents the restorative power of nature and the natural environment's ability to purify itself over time. The soft...

This story gets its title from Sara Teasdale's poem of the same name. In the story, the mechanical (nearly sentient) house asks Mrs. McClellan, presumably the woman of the house, what poem she...

Bradbury uses imagery in describing the dead humans as spots of paint. Imagery is descriptive language that literally paints a picture in the reader’s mind. This mental picture is created with...

Readers are not specifically told what has happened to any of the homes in the neighborhood. We are told that the house in the story "stood alone." The rest of the city is complete rubble, and only...

In this story, Bradbury shows how humans will be the agents of our own destruction. The narrator describes a house that does everything for its owners, all on its own. It cooks, it cleans, it reads...

One of the clearest themes in "There Will Come Soft Rains" is the theme of death. Notice how the death of the McClellan family (and of humans, more generally) is never made explicitly clear in the...

In Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains," the house is designed to perform every function that a servant would perform. It takes care of all domestic chores like cooking and...

Bradbury's futuristic short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," presents a world in which the quotidian humanity has been removed. For, it is the technologically-advanced house that expresses...