Set a poem before you, which you have not known, so you are greeting. React. Do you like it? Or not? If not, turn the page. Probe, if you like, but do not bemoan your failure to enthuse. A poem is like a kiss that way – to each their own. 

                  Reread it – then again. Let it seep like syrup into the waffle of your mind, till your thoughts are sopped with its sweetness. Surrender to it. Do you resist? Do certain stretches affect you less? That is interesting too.

                 Though I like this poem, I do not love it. It makes me smile but does not make my heart hurt. 

                 Its exact observation transports me to its milieu: a porch, perhaps, of a comfortable house in the woods. The poet is foreseeing a future moment by observing this one. A wild plum tree with its white flowers and a noisy robin denote the season: it is spring. The croaking frogs and darting swallows set the clock at dusk. (The frogs are mating; the swallows feeding.) The regular rhyme and relaxed cadence evoke an observer at peace, immersed in her instant. (Only a still heart can feel stillness. To a tortured heart, silence is ominous.)

                 That’s the poem’s first half: precise observation of peaceful perfection. But then a recollection intrudes – of guns, trenches, death, perhaps a loved one in uniform overseas: a raucous, angry vision, oblivious to the beguilements of peace. These eternal natural flora and fauna have no idea of these human disturbances – and, if they did, they’d find them incomprehensible. And even “if mankind perished utterly,” it would be no never-mind to them. Human insanity confronts nature’s eternity – and it’s no contest. Eternity wins every time.

                 The observation and music are exquisite. But those final two couplets put me off. While just, they’re too pat, almost schoolmarmishly dictating the moral of the scene. The rhymes – tree and utterly, dawn and gone – feel retrieved from a sampler, more than discovered. The personification of “Spring herself” feels borrowed from literature, not observed. Reducing the complex instant to an obvious peroration robs the reader of mystery, to haunt us after. It’s as if Ms. Teasdale clapped her book shut with a “Well, that’s that” and got busy setting the table for dinner.

                 I shy from poems that are tidy, because life isn’t. No truths, only glimpses. The most sublime music keeps playing in one’s mind, having posed a question which keeps sounding beyond its final note. “Happily ever after” consoles in bedtime stories but irks in maturity. It feels untrue.

                 That’s my take on this pretty poem, but it must not be yours. The only right view of art is your own. No two kisses alike. The joy of poetry is intimacy.

                 Vastly popular in the early years of the twentieth century, Sara Teasdale’s life ended sadly – in divorce, ill health, depression and eventually suicide at age 48. Knowing this, her poem feels as much avoidance as engagement. The war was not only overseas, but in her depths.

* 

There will come soft rains

Sara Teasdale (1884 –1933)

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.