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.
Literary Devices
Form
Despite Teasdale’s rage about the waste of war, and despite her controversial apocalypticism that told her readers their entire species was dispensable, the form of “There Will Come Soft Rains” reflects Teasdale’s respect for conventional forms of poetry. The poem is written in six rhyming couplets (two lines) with an AA BB CC rhyme scheme.
Against the formal experimentations of the expatriate American Modernists who took every chance to detonate inherited forms, Teasdale used the form of the poem to create a kind of welcome restraint—a sense of control and order despite the angry argument of the poem. Yes, the world is imploding, but Teasdale shares her radical and disturbing vision in six carefully metered and neatly rhymed couplets. Much like spring exercising its own kind of eco-order juxtaposed against the confusion and chaos of war, the poem reassures that order and stability are still possible in a world otherwise collapsing under the weight of its own brutality. A quiet assertion of form suggests that against the wholesale destruction of war—WWI introduced the first generation of weapons of mass destruction that left most of Europe’s most developed nations in grim rubble—the poet offers creation: a defiant glint of hope in a darkening time.
Meter and Sound
Against the chaos and noise of war, Teasdale offers a tableau of nature suggesting both order and serenity. To achieve this, Teasdale sculpts lines bundled in couplets, each line set in a reassuring, quietly assertive tetrameter: four units of stressed and unstressed beat. There are some subtle variations in the meter suggesting the essence of nature: Nature follows patterns, but not without subtle variations.
To create the ambience of quiet found in nature, the poem works through a soft braid of sibilant sounds—the repeated aspirating “s” sound, for instance, the gentle hum of the “m,” the open-mouthed pauses of the “w,” and the lilting linger of the “l.” The poem, read aloud, cannot be rushed. It is lyrical, inviting, lingering. The careful weave of long vowels—the open “o” and soft “a”—along with the sibilant consonants invites the reader to stay a moment within the poem’s refuge. Additionally, the poem resists too many end-lines or lines stopped by a period. The metrical pattern, enjambment (the spilling over of lines from one to the next without end stop punctuation), recreates the sense of nature’s own defiant commitment to animation by using open-ended lines. Teasdale even resists periods—that most apocalyptic of punctuation marks—preferring the softer pause of a semicolon (Lines 2, 6, and 10).
Voice and Tone
The voice of the speaker is never actually defined. The poet never creates a gendered or racial presence; thus, the voice is entirely defined by what it says and not who it is. The focus rests on nature; after all, the speaker is by definition part of the species bent on making heroic its own self-destruction. Nor does the poem identify to whom the voice speaks. The tone is kind of reassuring, kind of consoling. There will come a time, the voice assures, when the chaos will end—a time for spring and renewal. The promise, of course, is not entirely reassuring as the premise suggests the fullest realization of this Edenic time of restoration will come only at the detriment of humanity. Thus, pegging the voice that speaks is a challenge. It seems contradictory. Is the speaker snarky and ironic? Simmering and angry? Despairing and hopeless? Joyous and optimistic? Yes, to all of the above. Indeed, the poem can be considered in each tone. As in the confessional poetry of Emily Dickinson, whose work Teasdale admired, the paradoxical message complicates any definition of voice.
