Oppositional is one of the last terms likely to be applied to Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), a once widely acclaimed and popular poet whose works, in the wake of modernism, have sometimes been disparaged as sentimental or merely genteel. In fact she did oppose war in general and America’s entry into World War I in particular, privately lamenting the “war-madness” and “lunacy” she saw all around her in New York, and the idea that, after “four thousand years of so-called civilization . . . disputes between peoples are still settled by killing.” But political protest and poetry did not sit easily together, for her; when she published Love Songs, six months or so after the U.S. ended its neutrality, she left out her few explicitly antiwar lyrics, like “Spring in the Naugatuck Valley” (1915), about a Connecticut munitions plant, and never later collected them.
Her poem “‘There Will Come Soft Rains’”—published after the war had ended, in Flame and Shadow (1920)—hauntingly envisions a world from which humankind has “perished utterly,” twenty-five years before the dropping of the atomic bomb made such imaginings common. (Years later, Ray Bradbury would appropriate the poem in his postapocalyptic science fiction story borrowing her title.) In its way, it is surely an antiwar poem, and yet it almost seems to take comfort in the disappearance of the human, and of human pain.
(War Time)
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.