Like the Yeats poem on St Patricks Day, I first encountered this one as the title of a Bradbury short story about the only house standing after an implied nuclear war. In the story, the smart house recites the poem and it’s all very creepy.
Turns out, Sarah Teasdale wrote it after WWI and stripped of the story, it’s much less creepy and more pretty and melancholy.
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 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.