31 March, 2010

There Will Come Soft Rains

After reading my last post, Aishwarya shot me an email pointing me to this lovely little poem by Sara Teasdale:

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 pool 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.

Among other things, this inspired a short story by Ray Bradbury.

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Putting my editing hat on, aren’t those last two lines superfluous?