There Will Come Soft Rains

Despite Teasdale’s rage about the waste of war, and despite her controversial apocalypticism that told her readers their entire species was dispensable, the form of “There Will Come Soft Rains” reflects Teasdale’s respect for conventional forms of poetry. The poem is written in six rhyming couplets (two lines) with an AA BB CC rhyme scheme.

Against the formal experimentations of the expatriate American Modernists who took every chance to detonate inherited forms, Teasdale used the form of the poem to create a kind of welcome restraint—a sense of control and order despite the angry argument of the poem. Yes, the world is imploding, but Teasdale shares her radical and disturbing vision in six carefully metered and neatly rhymed couplets. Much like spring exercising its own kind of eco-order juxtaposed against the confusion and chaos of war, the poem reassures that order and stability are still possible in a world otherwise collapsing under the weight of its own brutality. A quiet assertion of form suggests that against the wholesale destruction of war—WWI introduced the first generation of weapons of mass destruction that left most of Europe’s most developed nations in grim rubble—the poet offers creation: a defiant glint of hope in a darkening time.