Backup:
Sara Teasdale‘s poem ‘There will come soft rains’ has haunted me since I came across it as a boy, quoted in the Ray Bradbury story of the same name, and eventually I just had to put a tune to it. This article now has what is probably the final recording of this setting rather than the rough demo. Here’s the poem.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows calling 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.
Wheal Alice Music 