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.
Themes
The Lure of Apocalypse
It is the peculiar arrogance of virtually every generation of American culture to assume it will be the last. From the Puritan pilgrims who believed the forbidding coastal wilderness of what they dubbed New England would serve as the soundstage for the new earth ushered in after the rain of destruction promised in Revelation, to contemporary environmentalists and nuclear survivalists, Americans have always seemed comfortable with the logic of end times. Within that mindset, the end of the world is expected with curiously giddy anticipation: The apocalypse, after all, will lay the foundation for the promised new heaven and new earth and would wipe clean the toxic influence of millennia of humanity driven by selfishness, greed, and violence.
Teasdale’s audience lived in a chaotic and violent world apparently coming apart at every seam. That world appeared to justify apocalyptic thought and the hope that such events were indeed the signs and wonders forecast in Revelation. Teasdale plays to that apocalyptic notion, but the poem does not offer the traditional Judeo-Christian restoration of God’s spiritually recharged Eden once humanity has been cleansed. The world will not be renewed with the energy of a Creator God whose power the apocalypse would validate. Teasdale offers a quiet counterargument: If humanity is bent on destroying itself, there will emerge no supranatural alternate world of salvation (and damnation) and no new earth for a spiritually reclaimed humanity to inhabit. Teasdale suggests that once humanity has gone about the business of destroying itself, the Earth—not God’s heaven—will return with the toxic violence of humanity replaced by the tonic fecundity and gentle community of nature. The poem offers not a radiant vision of some New Jerusalem but rather a green world without humanity, operating by its own quiet laws of eco-harmony and sustaining its own careful balance: a world of frogs and blossoming trees and swallows. It’s the world right outside the door but without humanity’s interference.
The Resilience of Nature
As part of the first generation of American writers in the new century influenced by the dramatic rise of scientific thought that defined the closing decades of the 19th century, Teasdale understood the implications of the new sciences as they unironically dismantled the quaint cosmology of Christianity. Nature does not need the superimposition of a creator figure. Nature revealed, if studied rather than worshiped or used as a tool for teaching morality, a complexity that was as fascinating as it was logical. As science in Teasdale’s time was only beginning to grasp, nature operated by laws that reflected the determination of living organisms to persist without the need to attach to some interfering god. Teasdale was particularly drawn to the controversial theories of Charles Darwin, whose broad perspective on the constant evolution of species not only dismissed Genesis as pleasant poetry, but suggested that the material universe operated along lines of survival rather than the capricious whims of some deity’s sense of moral bookkeeping and spiritual accountability.
The possibility, of course, was that absent the Christian God, nature seems indifferent to humanity. Once humanity has run its course, nature can assert its gentle rituals of community, harmony, and animation. In the poem, nature’s apathy to humanity’s pettiness is cause for celebration. Humanity’s determination to destroy itself will ultimately do just that. Nature will endure. Frogs will still sing at night, robins will still whistle their “whims” (Line 6), tree will still blossom, and swallows still circle with “their shimmering sound” (Line 2).
The Inconsequentiality of Humanity
At the dark emotional heart of Teasdale’s apparent hymn to the soft bucolic harmonies of nature is an attitude verging on misanthropy. How much better, how much more harmonious, how much sweeter would the earth be without humanity? It is a radical and discomforting question. Humanity has never embraced any sense of its inconsequentiality save through the elaborate angst of existentialism.
Teasdale’s time was no different. At the beginnings of the 20th century, humanity was fairly pleased with itself. After all, the closing century had seen unprecedented development in the sciences and technology, an unparalleled rise in industrialization, a new devotion to the power of democratic governments, a commitment to economic development, and a flowering of the arts in painting, literature, music. In shaking free or at least easing to the margins the idea of a dominant creator overseeing and directing the world, Teasdale’s generation was comfortable with the notion of humanity’s predominance. The Earth was humanity’s to use, exploit, and inevitably fight over. Whatever humanity touches, it wills to possess—the basic logic of sharing lost to the toxic pull of ambition, greed, and capitalism.
The poem offers a counter perspective: There is no solution to humanity save its elimination. Nature without humanity’s interference would abide by the compelling need to cooperate, flourish, and create and not dominate, ravage, and destroy. Encapsulated by the savage waste of a war that decimated the European countryside and its cities, humanity’s danger is a threat only to itself. Once humanity has destroyed itself, not one element of nature “will care at last when it is done” (Line 8). That world, Teasdale teases, is a world of harmony and cooperation that humanity will never know as humanity’s very presence makes harmony ironic and unattainable.
