There Will Come Soft Rains
Sara Teasdale, 1918
Sara Teasdale's poem, written during the First World War, imagining nature going on undisturbed after mankind has perished in war.
(War Time)
There will come soft rains 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 fireWhistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor treeIf mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,Would scarcely know that we were gone.