There Will Come Soft Rains

by

Ray Bradbury

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There Will Come Soft Rains Quotes

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There Will Come Soft Rains Quotes

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!

Related Characters: Clock (speaker), The House, The McClellan Family
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:

The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.

Related Characters: The House, The McClellan Family
Page Number: 222
Explanation and Analysis:

The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

Related Characters: The House, The Dog, Robot Mice
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:

The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.

Related Characters: The Dog, The McClellan Family
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:

There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass.

Related Characters: The House
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 224-225
Explanation and Analysis:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

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

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.

Related Characters: The Voice Reading Poetry (speaker), The McClellan Family
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:

At ten o’clock the house began to die. The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

Related Characters: The House, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Related Characters: Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.

Related Characters: The House, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: The House, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.

Related Characters: The House, Clock, Robot Mice, The Voice Reading Poetry, Fire
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”

Related Characters: Clock (speaker), The House
Related Symbols: The Natural World
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
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