Lyric poetry is poetry that expresses subjective thoughts and feelings in a songlike style, often using both rhythm and rhyme. It is not a coincidence that people who write words to songs are writing "lyrics," but lyric poetry does not necessarily imply a simple, unsophisticated style that must appeal to a mass audience to be considered popular. Truly, many of Teasdale's poems were set to music, especially the early ones in which the themes were lighter and more concerned with love and relationships than depression and war. "There Will Come Soft Rains" is lyrical and the couplets do rhyme, but its dark, cynical subject keeps the poem from falling into a simplistic, naïve category that describes some short, rhyming poems.

The obvious end-rhyming of the lines in this poem is offset by very effective alliteration within the lines. Alliteration is a poetic device used to...