There will come soft rains

Slightly related to the previous post, one of my favourite poems is ‘There will come soft rains’ by Sarah Teasdale, published in 1920:

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

And frogs in the pool 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.

Incredibly prescient when you consider it was written well before the Second World War, nuclear weapons and climate change.  The poem was featured in a short story of the same name in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Martian Chronicles’.

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