There Will Come Soft Rains

Sara Teasdale won the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1918, the year she wrote "There Will Come Soft Rains", a piece of writing that imagines the world without us. 

In the poem, Teasdale describes nature reclaiming a battlefield after war. She also writes about the extinction of humanity, far before the threats of nuclear winter, or weapons grade consumerism became a reality. 

Her poetry is known for its "simplicity and quiet intensity", and this poem is certainly all of that.



There Will Come Soft Rains


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 nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.


— Sara Teasdale [1884 - 1933]



Our war on nature is one that we will most certainly lose. We have treated the planet, and all life on it, so harshly, that it would surprise me if any wild creatures would miss us if we manage to do ourselves in. 

Would they celebrate our demise? I wouldn't blame them if they did.

Mary Oliver is another Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and she says, "Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem."

It doesn't have to be that way. We used to be a harmonious part of nature, and if we ever learn to adopt a global philosophy of simplicity, we will be again.

There will come soft rains, with us, or without us. The choice is ours.