What is "There Will Come Soft Rains" about?

Sara Teasdale’s poem, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” was
published in 1920. Like many writers of that time, Teasdale tried to grapple with how
World War I had changed the world, and that struggle came through in her work. In this
poem, which is written in six rhyming couplets, Teasdale introduces a mystical natural
world, full of life and color where “Robins will wear their feathery fire/ Whistling
their whims on a low fence-wire”. As lovely as this sounds, the seventh line tells
readers that this vibrant nature doesn’t care about us at all, and “will never know of
the war” that ravaged Europe and Russia from 1914 to 1918, “not one/ Will care at last
when it is done.” Nature doesn’t need humans, and doesn’t care about human suffering; in
fact, nature would be just as happy if we were all gone and the “frogs in the pool
singing at night,/ And wild plums trees in tremulous white” could reclaim the soil we’ve
tamed and colonized.

Because Teasdale personifies much of
her imagery, the animals and trees seem humanlike, which furthers the sense that actual
humans are absent. And the robin, rather than sitting on a branch or hopping on the
ground, is whistling on a fence, which makes clear that the poem isn’t set in the middle
of the wilderness, but rather within civilization. Teasdale might be imagining a
post-war world in which humans have all but disappeared, leaving the remains of
civilization to nature.

The heavy personification could
also indicate that Teasdale sees these natural creatures as metaphors for certain types
of people; she might imagine a world in which the war-like elements of civilization are
absent and unnecessary, leaving only those humans who are “circling with their
shimmering sound” and “whistling their whims,” a world in which art and poetry and
imagination exist without politics, countries, and
wars.

Overall, this poem displays many of the sentiments of
the Romantic Era, though Sara Teasdale was born too late to be considered a Romantic
poet. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a reminder to mankind that our actions matter only
to us, and that whether or not we struggle and suffer and perish, the world will
continue happily.