"There Will Come Soft Rains" is a lyric poem by Sara Teasdale, published shortly after the start of the 1918 German Spring Offensive during World War I and during the 1918 Flu Pandemic, about nature establishing a new peaceful order that is unconcerned about the outcome of the war or the extinction of mankind. The poem was included in her collection Songs of Two Worlds (1918). It has been interpreted as an example of retraversal poetry, with its images of destruction followed by renewal. Teasdale wrote the poem while staying at her brother's house in Devon, England. He had returned from France where he was serving in the medical corps, and she hoped to find inspiration for some new poems there. But although there were flowers in the fields and birds singing in the trees, everything seemed muted compared to what she was used to back home in America. When she visited her parents' gravesite later on, it reminded her of "the endless summer" they were denied due to the war. She also felt guilty for not having written more poems since beginning her career four years earlier. The theme of destruction and renewal is one that is familiar to many poets. But what makes "There Will Come Soft Rains" different is its use of nature imagery, which is common in British poetry but rare in American literature at the time.