science

There Will Come Soft Rains (poem)

There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) rather than just read about it. In short: "There Will Come Soft Rains" is a lyric poem by Sara Teasdale published just after the start of the 1918 German Spring Offensive during World War I, and during the 1918 flu pandemic about nature's establishment of a new peaceful order that will be indifferent to the outcome of the war or mankind's extinction. The work was first published in the July 1918 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine, and later revised and prov…

Key takeaways

There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a lyric poem by Sara Teasdale published just after the start of the 1918 German Spring Offensive during World War I, and during the 1918 flu pandemic about nature's establishment of a new peaceful order that will be indifferent to the outcome of the war or mankind's extinction. The work was first published in the July 1918 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine, and later revised and provided with the subtitle "War Time" in her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow (see 1920 in poetry). The "War Time" subtitle refers to several of her poems that contain "War Time" in their titles published during World War I, in particular to "Spring In War Time" that was published in her 1915 anthology Rivers to the Sea (see 1915 in poetry). The two poems, to the exclusion of all other of Teasdale works, appeared together in two World War I poetry anthologies, A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1917 published in 1917, and Poems of the War and the Peace published in 1921.

Text The original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" in Harper's Monthly Magazine does not contain the subtitle "War Time" that appears in the Flame and Shadow anthology, and "circling" in the second line was "calling" in the magazine. Quotation marks are included in the title, which is a stylistic convention used by the author that indicates the title is a phrase appearing in the first line of the poem.

The poem includes six stanzas, each made up of a rhyming couplet in irregular tetrameters.

Themes

Anti-war message In Flame and Shadow, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is the first of the six poems in section VIII that dwell on loss caused by war—all of which reflect pacifist sentiments. The subtitle "(War Time)" of the poem, which appears in the Flame and Shadow version of the text, is a reference to Teasdale's poem "Spring In War Time" that was published in Rivers to the Sea about three years earlier. "There Will Come Soft Rains" addresses four questions related to mankind's suffering caused by the devastation of World War I that appear in "Spring in War Time". The questions together ask how Nature can permit the Spring season to start while the war continues.

"There Will Come Soft Rains" expresses an anti-war message in that Nature, as personified by Spring, ignores the four questions asked by the poet in "Spring In War Time" by awakening even as war may destroy any meaning for mankind's existence because such meaning, if it exists at all, only resides within mankind itself. In the poem, Nature proceeds indifferently to the outcome of war or human extinction as the personified Spring would "not mind" because Spring "would scarcely know that we were gone".

The "War Time" subtitle and battlefield imagery The Sedition Act of 1918 enacted two months before the original publication of "There Will Come Soft Rains" made it a criminal offense to "willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States" and forced Teasdale to express her opposition to World War I "obliquely" in what might appear to be a pastoral poem. Flame and Shadow fell under the same regime of censorship since the Sedition Act was not repealed until December 13, 1920, but Teasdale revised her work to improve the chance that readers would perceive the implied battlefield imagery that, if made explicit, could have exposed her to criminal prosecution.

Influences Teasdale's point of view in "There Will Come Soft Rains" that the universe has no caring interest in the existence or any actions of human beings developed from her readings of the works of Charles Darwin, which began in earnest in 1913. The same principle applies to all of the other living things mentioned in the poem. Thus, given that swallows, frogs, and robins must kill other creatures to feed themselves, the serenity in the poetic settings for them symbolizes the absence in their natures of war that is in human nature and not an idyllic world without violence.

Adaptations Choral settings that incorporate all or parts of Teasdale's poem as lyrics have been published by several composers and performed by numerous organizations. These include:

Tom Vignieri, SSSAA with string orchestra, (publisher unknown 2010) Ivo Antognini, SSAATTBB a cappella, Alliance Music (2012) Eriks Esenvalds, SSAATTBB a cappella, Music Baltica (2016) Christopher Tin, SSAATTBB with string orchestra, piano, and others, Decca Classics (2022) A 1950 short story by Ray Bradbury shares the title and themes of the poem, and quotes it.

See also The World Without Us Life After People Aftermath: Population Zero Zone Rouge: Former World War I battlefields reclaimed by nature

References

External links

There Will Come Soft Rains public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Illustrations

There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) illustration

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with There Will Come Soft Rains (poem)

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of There Will Come Soft Rains (poem)

In research: There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1920 poems, American poems, Human extinction, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) in simple terms?

Why does There Will Come Soft Rains (poem) matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study There Will Come Soft Rains (poem)?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on There Will Come Soft Rains (poem).