"" Behind Their Lines: Not one will care at last when it is done

Friday, April 17, 2015

Not one will care at last when it is done


In 1920, two years after the Great War had ended, American poet Sara Teasdale published a poem about spring rains. In 1950, science fiction author Ray Bradbury, inspired by her poem, published a short story with the same title.   

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.

Like a fragile robin's egg, the 12-line poem breaks into two halves, the first six lines offering up the variety and vitality of spring, while the last six catalog emptiness and loss. 

The inverted syntax of the poem's title and first line places time in its future tense before the mention of rain, for this is a meditation on time, war, and memory.  The poem looks ahead to the future, and as it does so, it reinterprets many of the images that had been darkly associated with the First World War.  Unlike the "wild rain" of Edward Thomas's poem, the showers of Teasdale's poem are "soft." Unlike the "obscene, the filthy, the putrid" mud of Mary Borden's poem, in Teasdale's lyric, the "smell of the ground" carries the life-giving scent of the spring.  And unlike the "stiff and senseless" chum described in Rickword's "Trench Poets," whose unburied body recalls men who hung on the barbed wire of No Man's Land, in Teasdale's poem, robins perch on fence wire, "whistling their whims." 

In the shimmering sound of the swallows and the evening songs of the frogs, Teasdale asks us to listen as sweetness and harmony return to the world. 

But the second half of the poem echoes three times the words "not one":  not one will be left to know of the war, to care about the war, to mind "if mankind perished utterly."  While the first half of the poem suggests that spring and rebirth will bring healing to the wounds of war that have been inflicted on the landscape and the psyche, the tone of the second half of the poem is one of indifference rather than acceptance. 


Gassed, by Gilbert Rogers
Teasdale's poem now appears sadly prophetic.  Today in America, there are few who remember the First World War.  The Meuse-Argonne offensive is an unfamiliar name to many, despite the 26,277 American men who were killed and the 95,786 who were wounded in the battles.  The total American casualties of the war, estimated at 116,516 killed and 204,002 wounded, have largely been forgotten.  Teasdale's poem gives voice to the dead of the war in its final lines: "And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,/Would scarcely know that we were gone."  

10 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. Is or isn't just that what remembering is all about? Re-membering, meaning: making oneself a member once again, and then letting the war, its horrors and pains and sadness, slowly recede whilst time moves on. From hystery, from his or her (specific) story and on to history (which actually sounds the same).
    It is, ultimately, what the wonderfully moving Remembrance on the Ypres Market Square and the projected images on to the Cloth Hall (this last 31 July) were all about.
    Picking up, as a way of letting go.

    Best, from Bruges and the Fields of Flanders.
    Chris

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    1. Yes, the Cloth Hall projections were indeed remarkable. Ypres is permanently maintaining Remembrance

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  3. I love your thoughts on re-membering, Chris, and wished I could have been there to see the projected images on the Cloth Hall this year. From the photos I saw online, it looked like a very special way of commemorating and meaning-making.

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  4. Bradbury uses Teasdale's poem to show a world devastated by the soft rains of nuclear fallout that laid radioactive waste to the world. Your point about American memory and WW1 seems true. Perhaps because it gets overwhelmed by the bigger picture of four years and there was no D-Day moment or American supreme command. If any reader is anywhere near NYC, go see "World War one Beyond the Trenches" at the New York Historical Society. It explores America's reactions to and involvement in the war 1914-19 through the eyes of artists. It's a terrific exhibit and there until September 3rd. It includes Sargent's monumental "Gassed"- all 20 feet of it.

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  5. Can't agree more about the exhibit at the NY Historical Society -- I saw it while it was in Philadelphia and thought it one of the most intriguing, challenging, and powerful art shows I've seen. Thanks for reading and commenting, Josie.

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  6. There's a huge turn out today (8.8.2018) both at the Menin Gate and Amiens Cathedral to mark the start of the 100 days until 11.11.18 - the beginning of the end. So many remember. But I appreciate that the view in 1920 may have been very different. I think Sarah T would be gratified.

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  7. During the course of my research into the First World War for a series of commemorative exhibitions, I have come into contact with several people in the United States of America who, like Connie, put a great deal of time and effort into remembering the conflict. Among them are Keith Arden Colley from Texas who has a Mobile Military Museum with a great many WW1 artefacts.

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  8. It was actually published in a magazine in the summer of 1918, when the war was ongoing and it seemed like it would go on and on.

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    1. Thank you -- do you have the magazine and the publication date?

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