There Will Come Soft Rains (PR)

There Will Come Soft Rains

Sara Teasdale, 1884 - 1933

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
And frogs in the pools singing at night,

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.  

At the last BR choir concert, all of the choirs were singing songs with the theme of poetry. The middle school choir (Vocal Elements) was asked to sing "There Will Come Soft Rains", a piece based off of the poem by Sara Teasdale. I had to think extra hard about the words of this song because I was asked to conduct it as the Vocal Elements TA. Besides the excitement over the fact that I was going to get to conduct a song, I was also thrilled that it happened to be a song that I sang when I was in Vocal Elements in 6th grade (Time flies, doesn't it?). Of course, when I was in sixth grade all I thought about was getting the words ad pitches right rather than letting the meaning of those words sink in. The song lyrics aren't written exactly like the poem itself, but most of the words are the same. After looking at the piece again after six years, I saw that although this song is a beautiful piece with phrases of spring's magnificence (like in the first phrase -- "There will come..." to "sound") , it has a haunting element to it as well. Take last few stanzas. They talk of war and the destruction of mankind, not something one would expect in a shimmering song about spring. Seriously -- the melody and harmonies to the song are beautiful. Hidden behind that veil of beauty, however, is what I interpreted as a statement about the world itself. While history plays through it's course, nature prevails. People fight, war breaks out, traumatic events occur that change the outlook on life itself and still, the natural world continues on, never skipping a beat. The animals continue to live, the plants continue to grow, and the world continues moving forward.
        In the musical score, a phrase that doesn't actually appear in the poem was added to form the chorus. The pre-chorus consists of the poem's last three stanzas, ending on the sorrowful idea that Spring (being personified as a living being) would never even notice if mankind disappeared from the world, perishing in its own spiral of destruction. Then, the piece leads into a powerful cascading melody -- written as "And it will rain." "It will rain" is then repeated twice more to put more emphasis on the fact that the world still cries out for the tragedies that take place within it. Nature may be able to keep on living without humans, but the world is so much better with them. While there is tragedy within the world, there is also greatness and hope. Good people live and good things happen, as do the bad. This is one of the reasons I prefer the lyrics to the song based on the poem rather than the poem itself. I really liked that added-in phrase "It will rain". It really connected the two aspects of humanity and nature in three simple words. I may be biased from being a choir person, but it's the way I feel. The poem could be interpreted in different ways as well, but this was the level I got to after thoroughly analyzing my choir music. Ha! Well, I'll post a video I found on youtube so that you can actually see what I'm talking about. You can tell from the music the melancholy feeling that comes layered beneath the beauty -- especially in the pre-chorus. :)