Thursday 12 April 2012

Sara Teasdale (8/8/1884 - 29/1/33) There Will Come Soft Rains

American, Poet...... her work was much influenced by the poetry of Chrisina Rossetti. She spent a lot pf her short life in ill health, and despite several men falling in love with her, she died after an overdose of sleeping pills.
The following poem is from her 1920 collection, 'Flame and Shadow'  which inspired and featured in a famous short story of the same name by the Science Fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. Bradbury published his story in the 'Martian Chronicles' in 1951,  with the title 'August 2026: There Will Be Soft Rains' written in an era, like today when many people were concerned about the devastaing effects of nuclear weapons, the story depicts a world in which human beings have been destroyed by nuclear force. A cationary tale that followed the recent bombings in Agust 1945, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

There Will Come Soft Rains.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground
And swallows calling 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.

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Russian animated film, from 1987
based on Ray Bradbury's story
-Budet Leskovy Dozhd
Director - Nazim Tylyakhozayev



Gray Tree , 1911 - Piet Mondrion





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