"There Will Come Soft Rains, like many stories Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) had written in the early 1950s, was haunted by the fear of nuclear war. Sometimes known by the slightly longer title, "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains’" the story appeared in Bradbury’s 1951 collection The Martian Chronicles and remains one of his best-known and most widely studied short stories.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" takes its title from Teasdale’s poem, which was written during the First World War of 1914-18: the first mass industrial war. By 1950, when Bradbury borrowed Teasdale’s title for his story, technology had made war on an even vaster and more destructive scale possible, as the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shown in 1945.
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.