"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 fireWhistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor treeIf mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Words in this poem
- shimmering n.
- A gleam or glimmering.
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is in the public domain. This text is taken from Flame and Shadow, Project Gutenberg ebook #591; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sara Teasdale, "There Will Come Soft Rains", in Flame and Shadow (1920), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #591, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/teasdale-flame-shadow/there-will-come-soft-rains.html, id L20786.
Form and metre
"There Will Come Soft Rains" is 12 lines in 6 stanzas of 2 lines each. It is in rhyming couplets, 83% of the lines: octosyllabic couplets. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 70%).
See other poems in octosyllabic couplets, other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 AA groundA · soundA
- 2 AA nightA · whiteA
- 3 AA fireA · wireA
- 4 AA oneA · doneA
- 6 AA dawnA · goneA
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, | 11 | ··········· |
| And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; | 10 | ·/˘/˘··/˘· |
| And frogs in the pools singing at night, | 9 | ·····/˘·· |
| And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| Robins will wear their feathery fire | 8 | /˘···/˘/ |
| Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; | 9 | /˘······/ |
| And not one will know of the war, not one | 10 | ·········· |
| Will care at last when it is done. | 8 | ········ |
| Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree | 9 | ····/˘··· |
| If mankind perished utterly; | 8 | ·///˘/˘˘ |
| And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, | 9 | ··˘/····· |
| Would scarcely know that we were gone. | 8 | ·/˘····· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.