There Will Come Soft Rains Analysis

“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,...” is a line from Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains”,a poem that is included in the short story that has the very same title, by Ray Bradbury. The poem is placed in the shor Though they share a name, does that mean they have other similarities?

The theme of Sara Teasdale’s poem was that things aren’t going to stop just because humanity did. The theme of Ray Bradbury’s short story There Will Come Soft Rains is that no matter how much you built to protect you, mankind will always find a new way to kill each other.

Both themes are similar in the sense they are both speaking of war and death, but the points they are making may differ from each other. Sara Teasdale is saying that the rest of the living things on earth will carry on even after the fall of mankind. Ray Bradbury is saying that war and death are inevitable and humanity will always want and find a way to kill each other.

In paragraph 37, the poem reads, “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.” saying the rest of life on earth will carry on after the fall of humanity, and that they wouldn’t even notice we were gone. And when the house becomes paranoid, in Ray Bradbury’s short story paragraph 14, 13, and 15, the line reads, “... it had shut up it’s shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia… it quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off!” showing the reader that the house, now paranoid of its surroundings, was protecting itself from everything, locking itself up, ect.

The irony of this is that all of these precautions the people living at the house took to stay safe from the bomb, ended up only protecting itself, the house, and letting them die. The author included the poem within the story to further explain what had happened to destroy the city and kill the citizens by writing, “ and not one will know of the war, not one will care at last when it is done.” just solidifying the fact the devastation was the product of a bomb dropped on this town because of a war. 

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