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.
Symbols & Motifs
Spring
In the poem, the seasons edge into spring, which is freighted with symbolic suggestion. Spring symbolizes nature’s heroic persistence, its resistance to accepting its own annihilation.
Personified as maternal and loving, spring reveals the dead world of winter is only a phase—a movement-into something fertile, green, lush. Spring symbolizes nature’s rebirth, its renewal into the reassurance of continuity. Indeed, the poem aligns spring with the dawn—both are powerful symbols of nature’s commitment to its own revival and its concomitant indifference to humanity. Directed to a culture anxious about its own long-term viability and vulnerable to the dark implications of death, the poem uses spring to provide tempered optimism that if, humanity teeters off to its self-destruction as it seems compelled to do, nature will endure and spring will return. Against the wholesale slaughter and indiscriminate carnage of humanity’s gruesome wars, spring promises the busyness of creation and restoration, a natural world finally and happily free of humanity’s urge to destroy: “Spring herself […] / Would scarcely know that we were gone” (Lines 11-12).
The Low Fence-Wire
The low fence-wire upon which the robins perch while “whistling their whims” (Line 6) introduces the sobering presence of humanity into what is otherwise a bucolic landscape. It is possible the fence represents humanity’s curious need to section the Earth into geopolitical boundaries and then contest others for possession of those sections, symbolizing humanity’s penchant for ownership that leads inevitably leads to war. More specifically, the low fence-wire, given its positioning to the ground, might reference the barbed wire first introduced in WWI as a way to protect encampments and trenches: a symbol of war itself. In that reading, the smell of the ground mentioned in Line 1 could refer to the stench of battle, from mustard gas to rotting corpses. The pools in which the frogs sing at night might refer to trenches dug and then abandoned. The “feathery fire” (Line 5) of the robin’s red breast contrasts the feathery fire of the scattered corpses soaked in blood. These details suggest at once humanity’s destructive interference in the natural world and humanity’s ephemeral presence—the remnants of the battlefield easing into irrelevance as the frogs and trees and birds take back the fields and render humanity’s wars as trivial.
War
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is an anti-war poem in which no shots are fired, no soldiers are killed, and no bombs explode. War symbolizes the extreme expression of humanity’s perplexing selfishness, its tendency to see violence as resolution, its commitment to destruction, and the wholesale abandonment of the religious virtues defining it: compassion, respect for life, kindness, and restraint. Because the opening line is in future tense, the poem promises that the bloodshed, the brutalities, the destruction will not last forever. To a culture weary of war, the poem extends ironic consolation: Humanity seems committed to its own destruction but nature cannot be destroyed. When humanity at last realizes the ultimate and inevitable end of its cannibal-logic, nature “would scarcely know [humanity was] gone” (Line 12). Given its titanic place in the histories humanity writes, war sustains itself; it justifies itself given the unexamined arrogance of civilizations that long seen themselves as important and immortal and their wars as heroic and noble. Imagine, the poem argues, that wars simply do not matter—that nature barely notices these epical struggles, and that in the end the only destruction that will endure is the destruction of humanity itself.
