There will come soft rains (War Time) by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains (War Time)

by Sara Teasdale

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.

I love how surprising this poem is!

Teasdale begins with wha is a hopeful and optimistic reminder; yes, we are at war, but springtime is coming, and with it, the rebirth of nature.

She mentions a variety of lovely things we think of when we think of spring: soft rains, birds, frogs, budding trees, and my favorite, "the smell of the ground."

Those are the images in the first 3 couplets. Very soothing. A hug of positivity from the poet to the humans reading this poem.

The 4th couplet seems to shift its focus, because we as readers have assumed that the first 3 stanzas are for us. The focus is on the natural world, and how it is ignorant of the war, both while it is happening and after it has ended. (I disagree with nature not being aware of war. Animals might not understand exactly what is happening, or why, but they are greatly affected, as is all of the natural world, when humans decide to kill one another.)

Stanza 5 lays it on the line. Nature if not mind if humans are all killed off. In the 6th couplet, Teasdale personifies Spring, telling us that she also will be oblivious to our human absence when she arrives.

Although a reader might find the point of this poem disturbing, poets being straight out about things is one of the things I love about poetry. Humans often do need to be knocked down a peg or two. Plus, we know from lockdown, when the natural world revitalized as humans stayed indoors, that Teasdale is not being mean. She is assuming (this was, of course, written long before Covid) that without humans, the natural world will thrive and be better off without us, something that was starting to happen during lockdown.

Sara Teasdale lived from 1884 to 1933. She was born in Saint Louis and lived there until she married; she and her husband moved to New York City. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, Love Songs, in 1918. She died from suicide.