Poem: There Will Come Soft Rains Essay, Research Paper

There will come soft rains (War Time)

By Sara Teasdale

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 fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird not tree,

If mankind perished utterly;

And spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

“There will come soft rains”, by Sara Teasdale, talks about the theme of how mankind is detriment to the life cycle of nature, rather than being good for it. Teasdale uses the literary techniques rhyming, alliteration, personification, and imagery to bring out the theme. The mood of the poem is quietness and the author’s attitude towards humans is that they are bad for nature. These affects bring the theme out great. Teasdale rhymes every two lines of her poem and separates the rhyming matches from each other. “Ground” and “sound” rhyme as well as “night” and “white”. So do “fire” with “wire” and “one” with “done”. The rhyming is used thoroughly without skimping a single line. Along with rhyming there is definite alliteration. The repetition of the letters can be picked up easily. In the first two lines “s” is repeated. The words “soft”, “smell”, “swallows”, “shimmering” all start with “s”. Then in the third pairing of two lines, the letter “w” is repeated. The words “will”, “wear”, “whistling”, “whims” all start with “w”. The alliteration corresponds with the personification of the poem. “Whistling”, which is part of that alliteration is also a personification given to the robins. The “frogs singing”, and the “robins wearing their feathery” fire are also personifications. The first three techniques kind of add up to give the effect of imagery. Imagery is everywhere on this poem. The “soft rains with the smell of the ground”, “robins wear their feathery fire” and “frogs singing at night” all are examples of imagery identified in the poem. All these techniques add up to back up the theme of humans being a detriment to nature and how they would not be missed.