Piano is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, she analyzes how Teasdale's lyric poem reflects the indifference of the natural world to the destruction of humanity during war time.

During World War I, many American and British poets expressed through their poetry their feelings of outrage and horror about the loss of a generation of young men killed in the fields of Northern Europe. Sara Teasdale, a young American poet known more for her love poetry than political statements, contributed to these anti-war sentiments in her lyric poem "There Will Come Soft Rains." As defined by literary critic M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, a lyric poem is "any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception." Written in the lyric...