There Will Come Soft Rains

When Sara Teasdale published “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the notion of apocalypse was in the air. The Great War introduced Western civilization—still rooted in quaint 19th century nostalgia—to the eye-opening realities of what science and technology could do to exponentially up the stakes in war. “There Will Come Soft Rains” reflects Teasdale’s angry opposition to American involvement in World War One and is very much directed to her British and American readership already weary of the war and sickened over the unprecedented destruction and heavy casualties of both soldiers and civilians.

But to narrow Teasdale’s focus to a mere critique of what she perceived to be the pointless viciousness of WWI is to miss how dramatically the poem reveals a poet involved not so much in criticizing her government’s careless slide into a brutal war as she was interested in projecting a post-apocalyptic world, sublime and serene once all humanity is gone. The poem forsakes the self-righteous anger or soul-wrenching pessimism characteristic of pacifist poetry. Indeed, Teasdale mentions neither WWI nor a single soldier nor battle. Absent a footnote that provides the lyric poem its context, Teasdale’s poem can seem quietly compelled by a romantic, escapist perception of nature. Provided the footnote and the poem at once darkens and offers what is a most difficult optimism.

Here, the apocalypse is a good thing because in destroying itself, humanity will rid nature of its most dangerous parasite. Like some virus blindly destroying the very system that keeps it alive, humanity—as its technology evolves to make its wars more efficient and more brutal—will eventually destroy itself. Such an apocalypse is supposed to be scary. The projection of a world without humanity traditionally offers a shivery landscape with the earth in death throes. The grim nature of these conjured postapocalyptic worlds has long been intended to function as a corrective.

In the closing stanza, the poet is calmly confident that humanity will destroy itself. Yet there is no regret, no snarky irony intended to prod humanity to reform. There is an unseemly delight in a world without humanity. The pronoun “we” in the closing line suddenly implicates the reader in the startling reality that this bucolic and peaceful spring morning is made possible only through the elimination of humanity. That inevitability is offered as consolation even before the poem reveals that the pastoral descriptions of the opening four stanzas are the poet’s projection of the earth after humanity has destroyed itself. The wisdom here is as ancient as Ecclesiastes: Generations come and generations go but the earth abides forever (an insight not lost on Teasdale, raised a Catholic and an autodidact in the literatures of Judeo-Christianity).

The angst in the poem comes from the reality of the ongoing war in which Western civilization appeared determined to destroy itself. Set against thundering headlines of the war’s reality, Teasdale’s gentle poem can seem as soft and insignificant as the swallows, frogs, and plum tree blossoms. Although the poem can read like a wistful daydream conjuring idyllic natural landscape, the poem seethes with the old-school fury of an apocalyptic prophet. Nothing in nature would miss humanity; for all its much-vaunted culture, scientific progress, hubris, and naïve faith in the durability of itself, humanity could become little more than another extinct species (and for eons, nature dispenses with more than 10,000 species every year). This is surely an upbeat apocalypse—a vision of humanity’s demise uncomplicated by compassion or regret. Nature would move forward, obedient to its own deep rhythms, perpetually renewing itself through the reassuring dynamic of the seasons. The ravages of humanity’s petty feuds will heal; the noise of gunfire and bombs and the screams of dying will quiet into the soft songs of the birds and the frogs.

The poem then is at once an anti-war poem and a philosophical meditation drawing from the sciences and religious writings. Surrounded by a culture at war, animated by the shrill and heated rhetoric that glorified what was devolving into endless savagery, Teasdale asserts a kind of warning that offers a problematic sort of optimism. By avoiding the details of war’s brutality and juxtaposing a world at war with a natural world at peace, Teasdale despairs of humanity’s ability to reform.