There Will Come Soft Rains Analysis

The human race advances through time, with almost no acknowledgement of the downfall they have created for themselves. Through ambition and greed we have begun to destroy the only place we can call home. Since the beginning of time we have fought for land, needlessly spilling blood to achieve pride and satisfaction. The machines we build pollute our land and air, but we continue building. We drain the resources of our land, hungry for wealth and power, but for what? We are wiping ourselves out quicker than we realize and in a matter of time, there will be no trace of human being on planet earth.

In the poem, it is the human race that is systematically eliminating what is left of the remains of earth’s nature.

Ray Bradbury has written several futuristic stories which portray the advancement of society. “There Will Come Soft Rains” contains technology in the house that we only dream about. Our current homes, compared to the house in Bradbury’s story, seem bland and helpless in comparison.

“August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains” is a story written by Ray Bradbury. The story opens in a living room of a well technologically advance house, where a clock which is voice activated yells out the time, making sure everyone gets up, and also makes breakfast, cleans, and does just about all the household things you are to do. After we read about all the things the house does, we start to notice that the house is empty, which then leads us to learn about the silhouettes on the walls of the house, which we can infer, based on our knowledge of bombs that this is from some type of nuclear bomb. As we read on we learn that the house is the only house left standing in a pile of ruins. After a while the voice in the house starts to play one of Mrs. McClellan favorite poems, which is ironic given the type of situation that the house is unaware that has taken place, the poems talks about nature and how it will still move on and not care that mankind has wiped itself out completely. After the poem, the mood of the story changes the house catches on fire and even with all of its technology it still can’t stop the fire and burns down, the only thing that remains is a wall, which holds the clock that just keeps repeating the date August 5, 2026. From reading the story I think the author plays with the idea that nature is the only thing that can go along its track without any human interactions.

The poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale has the same name and same meaning as the Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Sara Teasdale’s poem is reflecting about the Great War (World War I) and how wars will be humanities downfall and nature will carry on. In Ray Bradbury’s story a nuke destroyed a part of California and a technological house carries on. In this passage, I will be talking about how the time periods relate to each author, our current time period, and the future time period.

In a world that we, as humans, have begun to destroy and shape for the worse, there is still so much that we are oblivious to. From the illegal endangered animal trade to harmful CO2 and methane, Racing Extinction has revealed to both myself and society the constantly ticking clock that is Earth.

This is incredibly ironic because humans have disappeared, the need for time has ended, and nature will flourish and take back what was taken from

Francisco Nodarse Shaw AP English Literature and Composition 2 March 2017 Poetry Prompt: There Will Come Soft Rain Nature has long been recognized as therapeutic – Thoreau’s excursion served as a source of meditation and inspiration for generations of writers. Teasdale, taking a hint from her Transcendentalist predecessor, uses the peaceful imagery of the natural world to juxtapose the evil of humanity with the innocent beauty of nature, reminding the audience of its inevitable transience and urging it to make its time on Earth constructive instead of destructive. The opening couplet immediately immerses the reader in the all-encompassing calm of the wild.

Evolution and extinction are both concepts Elizabeth Kolbert introduce in her book The Sixth Extinction. The way she introduces the concepts is by telling the story of how the the concepts came to be. One reason humans should have a special status is because we don't just kill other species for nutrition we exploit them. “Over the next several decades, other uses for the great uses for the auk were found besides “sustentation”” (Kolbert 60).

As much as we as humans try to protect and conserve our planet’s natural resources, there seems to be no going back. We humans have already destroyed our planet. In the article “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” Karieva starts off by saying that “By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline… Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we're saving.” Karieva also defines this time period in which we live, referred to as the Anthropocene as a “new geological era in which humans dominate every flux and cycle of the planet's ecology

I decided to write about this particular poem because it interested me how it was straightforward with the message behind it. Humans know that we aren’t going to live forever; that eventually our time is up and we no longer will be a part of planet Earth. At first, I struggled with understanding what the poem was about but after reading the poem, it came to me that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has a strong and important lesson for the readers. The author wants us to realize the true meaning of our life and wants to value our time on Earth.

Anthropocentrism is the position that humans are the most important or critical element in any given situation; that the human race must always be its own primary concern. Detractors of anthropocentrism argue that the Western tradition biases our species when considering the environmental ethics of a situation and that we evaluate our environment or other organisms in terms of the utility for us (see speciesism). Many argue that all environmental studies should include an assessment of the intrinsic value of non-human beings.[15] In fact, based on this very assumption, a philosophical article has explored recently the possibility of humans' willing extinction as a gesture toward other beings.[16] The authors refer to the idea as a thought experiment that should not be understood as a call for action.

In many films, books, and stories set in the future, the story will be of a dystopian world at the point of the earth being in ruin and rubble. While most of these stories will present the cause of the dying world from a lucrative standpoint, such as the world being taken over by aliens or a zombie apocalypse, there is a much more likely cause of the destruction of the earth. This would be the consequences of humanity’s error. This cause applies to the real world more than any other scenario or conspiracy. As a human race we have always managed to evolve, but only in the last couple decades have we managed to advance terribly well. And I truly mean that, because it is great for us, but terrible for any other species that is not us.

The poem titled “The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth dramatizes the conflict between people and nature. The speaker, who seems to be an environment activist targets this poem towards the people of modern day society. With the rise of technology, manufacturing capabilities, and many other distractions in life, humans are beginning to show less attention and care less about the environment. This poem further describes how humans are undeserving of the environment since they tend to take advantage of it for their own benefit. Humans do not deserve nature because they fail to see its beauty and value.

Billions of years ago, humanity as the world knew it went completely extinct. The human race had ravaged the Earth’s precious resources, using it to their own benefit. This, is what ultimately served as their downfall.