Analysis on there come the soft rains

American writer Ray Bradbury (1920 to 2012) was one of the most popular and
prolific fantasy and science fiction writers of the 20th century. He is probably best
known for his novel, but he also wrote hundreds of short stories, several of which
have been adapted for film and television.

First published in 1950, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is a futuristic story that
follows the activities of an automated house after its human residents have been
obliterated, most likely by a nuclear weapon.

The Influence of Sara Teasdale

The story takes its title from a poem by Sara Teasdale (1884 to 1933). In her
poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", Teasdale envisions an idyllic post-
apocalyptic world in which nature continues peacefully, beautifully, and
indifferently after the extinction of humankind.

The poem is told in gentle, rhyming couplets. Teasdale uses alliteration liberally.
For example, robins wear "feathery fire" and are "whistling their whims." The
effect of both the rhymes and the alliteration is smooth and peaceful. Positive
words like "soft," "shimmering," and "singing" further emphasize the sense of
rebirth and peacefulness in the poem.

Contrast With Teasdale

Teasdale's poem was published in 1920. Bradbury's story, in contrast, was
published five years after the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at
the end of World War II.

Where Teasdale has circling swallows, singing frogs, and whistling robins,
Bradbury offers "lonely foxes and whining cats," as well as the emaciated family
dog, "covered with sores," which "ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a
circle and died." In his story, animals fare no better than humans.

Bradbury's only survivors are imitations of nature: robotic cleaning mice,

aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and the colorful exotic animals projected
onto the glass walls of the children's nursery.

He uses words like "afraid," "empty," "emptiness," "hissing," and "echoing," to

create a cold, ominous feeling that is the opposite of Teasdale's poem.
In Teasdale's poem, no element of nature would notice or care whether humans
were gone. But almost everything in Bradbury's story is human-made and seems
irrelevant in the absence of people. As Bradbury writes:

"The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing,
attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion
continued senselessly, uselessly."

Meals are prepared but not eaten. Bridge games are set up, but no one plays
them. Martinis are made but not drunk. Poems are read, but there's no one to
listen. The story is full of automated voices recounting times and dates that are
meaningless without a human presence.

The Unseen Horror

As in a Greek tragedy, the real horror of Bradbury's story remains offstage.
Bradbury tells us directly that the city has been reduced to rubble and exhibits a
"radioactive glow" at night.

Instead of describing the moment of the explosion, he shows us a wall charred

black except where the paint remains intact in the shape of a woman picking
flowers, a man mowing the lawn, and two children tossing a ball. These four
people were presumably the family who lived in the house.

We see their silhouettes frozen in a happy moment in the normal paint of the
house. Bradbury does not bother describing what must have happened to them. It
is implied by the charred wall.

The clock ticks relentlessly, and the house keeps moving through its normal
routines. Every hour that passes magnifies the permanence of the family's
absence. They will never again enjoy a happy moment in their yard. They will
never again participate in any of the regular activities of their home life.

The Use of Surrogates

Perhaps the pronounced way in which Bradbury conveys the unseen horror of the
nuclear explosion is through surrogates.

One surrogate is the dog who dies and is unceremoniously disposed of in the
incinerator by the mechanical cleaning mice. Its death seems painful, lonely and
most importantly, unmourned. Given the silhouettes on the charred wall, the
family, too, seems to have been incinerated, and because the destruction of the
city appears complete, there is no one left to mourn them.
At the end of the story, the house itself becomes personified and thus serves as
another surrogate for human suffering. It dies a gruesome death, echoing what
must have befallen humanity yet not showing it to us directly.

At first, this parallel seems to sneak up on readers. When Bradbury writes, "At
ten o'clock the house began to die," it might initially seem that the house is
simply dying down for the night. After all, everything else it does has been
completely systematic. So it might catch a reader off guard when the house truly
starts to die.

The house's desire to save itself, combined with the cacophony of dying voices,
certainly evokes human suffering. In a particularly disturbing description,
Bradbury writes:

"The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the
heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red
veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air."

The parallel with the human body is almost complete here: bones, skeleton,
nerves, skin, veins, capillaries. The destruction of the personified house allows
readers to feel the extraordinary sadness and intensity of the situation, whereas a
graphic description of the death of a human being might simply make
readers recoil in horror.

Time and Timelessness

When Bradbury's story was first published, it was set in the year 1985. Later
versions have updated the year to 2026 and 2057. The story is not meant to be a
specific prediction about the future, but rather to show a possibility that, at any
time, could lie just around the corner.