| "There Will Come Soft Rains" | |
|---|---|
| by Sara Teasdale | |
&sq=Qlik&lang=&file=File:Sara_Teasdale,_Sarony_Photo.jpg) Portrait of Sara Teasdale, 1914 | |
| Genre(s) | Lyric poetry |
| Meter | Irregular tetrameter |
| Rhyme scheme | Couplet |
| Publisher | Harper's Magazine |
| Publication date | July 1918 |
| Media type | Print magazine |
| Lines | 12 |
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a lyric poem by Sara Teasdale published just after the start of the 1918 German Spring Offensive during World War I, and during the 1918 flu pandemic about nature's establishment of a new peaceful order that will be indifferent to the outcome of the war or mankind's extinction. The work was first published in the July 1918 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine,[1] and later revised and provided with the subtitle "War Time" in her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow[2] (see 1920 in poetry). The "War Time" subtitle refers to several of her poems that contain "War Time" in their titles published during World War I, in particular to "Spring In War Time" that was published in her 1915 anthology Rivers to the Sea (see 1915 in poetry). The two poems, to the exclusion of all other of Teasdale works, appeared together in two World War I poetry anthologies, A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1917 published in 1917,[3] and Poems of the War and the Peace published in 1921.[4]
- ^ Sara Teasdale (July 1918). "There Will Come Soft Rains". Harper's Monthly Magazine. Retrieved 2020-09-23.
- ^ Sara Teasdale (1920). "Flame and Shadow". The MacMillan Company. Retrieved 2020-09-23.
- ^ Clarke, George, ed. (1917). "Contents, Acknowledgments, Introduction". A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1917. New York: Hodder and Stoughton. pp. 186, 420.
- ^ Leonard, Sterling, ed. (1921). Poems of the War and the Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. pp. 113–114.