April soft and cold: My first look at the sea

I was introduced to the American poet Sara Teasdale via Ray Bradbury when I was in high school. I must have been in the 11^th grade when we read his short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, which is about the Internet of Things (IoT). And Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Of course Bradbury didn’t know we’d be calling it IoT when he set it in the year 2026, but that’s our term now in 2015 for when everything in your life runs just fine though the intercession of computers, whether you’re there or not. Ever again.

The title comes from Teasdale’s poem of the same name:

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.

Here’s another of hers, not nearly as fraught for me by association with anything like post-apocalyptic machine-based serenity. In fact, this one is much more up my street.

“Gray Eyes”

It was April when you came
The first time to me,
And my first look in your eyes
Was like my first look at the sea.

We have been together
Four Aprils now
Watching for the green
On the swaying willow bough;

Yet whenever I turn
To your gray eyes over me,
It is as though I looked
For the first time at the sea.