There Will Come Soft Rains

Going through Ray Bradbury’s marvellous short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” with a student the other day, it came to me that it demonstrated how far appreciation for poetry has fallen in the culture. The story was first published in 1950, but imagined American life in 2026. A fully automated house; we’re not there yet. But Bradbury assumed that the automated house would be programmed to read a requested poem to each occupant each evening. And the integrated audio clock announced each hour with a little rhyme.

In 1950, this was popular culture. Poetry was as central as, say, pop music is now.

Bradbury’s prose is also notably poetic. Rather than automatically going for the shortest and most common word, as the modernist style commands, he pays close attention to cadence.