Analysis of There will Come Soft Rain by Sara Teasdale

There will Come Soft Rain

by Sara Teasdale 

There will come soft rain 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. 

There will come soft rain is a poem that invokes a lot of the sentiments found in the environmental movement.  The poem begins with the eponymous line There will come soft rain.   Rain here carries the connotation of natural renewal.   Along with the nest line which sets up the simple AB rhyme scheme the poem gives an idea of spring.   The next couplet continues on with it's vivid descriptions of nature in spring invoking the music of frogs and plum trees blooming in white.  Both lines here draw their symmetry from their nine syllable counts along with the end rhyme.

The third stanza beautifies nature in the form of Robbins and introduces civilization to us in the form of low fence wires.  It becomes apparent after the first read through that the low fence wire here might be barbed wire, as the next stanza invokes a war in the past tense.  Here the birds are characterized as unconcerned with the  carnage wrought by a past war.  The solitude of nature here belies a further emptiness of civilization as if every human had died in a war.

The next stanza continues on from the perspective of nature in the form of trees and birds, and how they'd be utterly unconcerned about the extinction of mankind.

The last stanza finally states outright the visages of spring for what they are, a renewal in the form of blooming trees and birdsong along with spring rains.  It emphasizes the innocence of nature to one of it's own events, extinction.  In this case the extinction of mankind.

The poem is poignant in emphasizing to the reader that nature would carry on without us with nary a change in tune. That is the natural rythmns of life spring, summer, fall, and winter would carry on without a change.