Teasdale, Tin, and Memley: There Will Come Soft Rain, Part II

Franz Marc, *In the Rain*, (1912), oil on canvas, Lenbachhaus, Image Source: wikimedia

“There Will Come Soft Rains” 

by Sara Teasdale

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 fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

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.

poets.org

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“There Will Come Soft Rains” is a lyric poem by Sara Teasdale published in the July 18 issue of “Harper’s” magazine, 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 musical composition “There Will Come Soft Rains” is part of a musical trilogy entitled “Impressions” by Kevin Memley. The trilogy captures Sara Teasdale’s reflections in three distinct choral compositions for treble voices. Memley’s treatments are exquisite masterpieces. Although the three selections are released separately, they are often presented as a trilogy. www.AtlantaMasterChorale.org