19 pages • 38 minutes read
Sara TeasdaleThere Will Come Soft Rains
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost (1920)
As a striking alternative to Teasdale’s gentle apocalypticism and her reassurance that nature will persist, Frost’s wry verse—with its casual indifference to the prospect of humanity’s annihilation—represents the ironic and dark vision typical of the Modernists. In the poem, Frost accepts apocalypse with a grim shrug, either hate (fire) or greed (ice) will bring on the end. This is not so much an anti-war poem as an anti-everything poem—a position more in line with the Modernists than with Teasdale’s sense of the enduring benediction of nature.
“Spring in War-Time” by Sara Teasdale (1917)
Written at the same time as “There Will Come Soft Rains,” this poem offers the darker side of Teasdale’s complicated optimism. This poem is more a lamentation directly anatomizing the impact of WWI. Unlike “There Will Come,” this poem is set in war-time. Here, the world at war seems to triumph. The world is engulfed in the grief caused by the insanity and brutality of conflict. The poet wonders whether spring will ever return, how the sun can bear to rise to reveal the horrors of the battlefield, and how grass can find the strength to cover the careless toss of battlefield casualties.
“In Flanders Fields” by Captain John McCrae (1915)
To understand the need of a public at war for poetry that celebrates the courage, sacrifice, and heroic determination of soldiers (and to understand why Teasdale needed to use such an indirect strategy for criticizing the same war), this poem was hailed as exactly the kind of patriotic poetry countries at war needed. Penned by a Canadian field medic who died in the war, the poem speaks of the heroism of the soldiers who died in battle and the need for those still in the fight to complete their heroic crusade or the casualties will never find their way to peaceful repose.
Further Literary Sources
“‘How Autocratic Our Country Is Becoming’: The Sentimental Poetess at War” by Melissa Girard (2009)
This essay examines the dilemma Teasdale faced: how to hold the American government accountable for electing to join a pointless and brutal war while maintaining her public persona as a delicate, even sentimental, poet. Teasdale’s objections to the war ran deep, and this essay examines her strategies for expressing those indelicate opinions in poetry that used conventional rhythm and rhyme to maintain the appearance of civility.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry ed. by George Walter (2007)
This far-ranging volume provides more than 1000 examples of poetry, often patriotic and heroic, published by the generation of poets—most of them soldiers—who saw in the war in Europe as the stuff of epic adventure, romance, and glory. One chapter is devoted to the anti-war poetry, most often defined by inflammatory rhetoric of dissent and angry polemics. Walter’s generous introduction provides critical information about the nature of WWI and includes an examination of pacifists’ responses, including Teasdale’s.
Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets by Cheryl Walker (1991)
The book addresses the issue of women poets in a male-dominated culture and touches on Teasdale’s hasty movement to the margins of American poetry despite her widespread popularity and critical success during her life. The section, available as its own essay on the internet, makes the case that Teasdale effectively straddled two radically different generations in American poetry. If her form was inherited and derivative, her themes—women in love, the rise of industrial America, the loss of nature, the struggle to define purpose in a scientific cosmos denied its god, and her profound objections to the bloody and immoral mess of WWI—were decidedly modern. She played the polite poet while writing verse as angry, confrontational, and uncompromising as any produced by the (mostly male) Modernists.
Listen to the Poem
Given its timeless theme of unapologetic pacificism and its gentle evocation of a spring morning, the poem has been interpreted in numerous strategies, often as part of literature class projects. It has been set to music (most notably as a sorrowful folk-ish ballad); it has been set to gruesome anti-war animation sequences; and it has been co-opted by the contemporary environmentalist movement to heroically hymn the strength of nature to withstand humanity’s relentless appetite for self-destruction.
Perhaps the most interesting interpretation, however, is done by the group LiveCanon and available on YouTube. A trio of women (and the recordings of the poem by male readers fail to capture Teasdale’s determined feminism) recites the poem with dramatic gestures and daring smiles that capture the poem’s sly sense of optimism over nature’s resiliency and humanity’s vulnerability.
