There Will Come Soft Rains -- Sara Teasdale

(Poem #223) There Will Come Soft Rains 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. -- Sara Teasdale

This is probably Teasdale's best-known poem, though, I feel, more for the
message than because it stands out as a poem. The notion that Man is rushing
headlong towards his own destruction is one that has embedded itself in the
racial consciousness ever since Hiroshima, and one that neither the cold war
nor an ever increasing sense of future shock have done anything to dispel.

Of course, one of the first writers to spring to mind is Bradbury, who has
written a number of stories on the theme, one of them[1] based explicitly on
the poem. However, there is a significant difference to be noted. Bradbury's
stories - and, indeed, those of a score of other sf writers - all convey a
profound sense of tragedy, of loss; which, of course, is hardly surprising.

Teasdale, on the other hand, manages to convey a sense of detachment, even
indifference. Indeed, one feels, the earth will neither know nor care that
mankind has come and gone. And that may be, in the final analysis, the most
disturbing prospect of all.

[1] 'There Will Come Soft Rains'; see
[broken link] http://home.earthlink.net/~hiflyer/APbradbury/twcsr.htm for an analysis of
the story

Biography etc:

See the previous Teasdale poem, Morning, poem #113

-martin