her to criminal prosecution. The "War Time" subtitle of "There Will Come Soft Rains", often omitted from copies and adaptations of the work, emphasizes the transition from what was in 1918, the most horrific event in human history, to some future peace. The subtitle inserted for Flame and Shadow (published in 1920 after the end of World War I) has a dynamic effect on a work that otherwise could easily be interpreted as a static post-war construct. The dynamic setting is most easily seen from the viewpoint of a soldier or veteran with battlefield experience, though that view is not essential, as the replacement of brutal "wartime" imagery of World War I battlegrounds by the imagery for peace. The literary device is through implicit contrast. In particular, the imagery in the very first line is ambiguously peaceful and war-like with the latter connoting "soft rains" as miserable conditions for battles fought in mud, and "the smell of the ground" meaning the smell of spent weapons; phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas (close to the ground); or the stench of rotting animal and human corpses. In a combatant's view, the second line for the peaceful image of swallows "circling" (the other Flame and Shadow revision) in the sky replaces a wartime image of noisy military aircraft performing reconnaissance or dropping explosives on combatants below. "Pools" for frogs in the third line refers to standing water in flooded wartime trenches and the consequential misery of men living, fighting, sickening, and dying in them. The profuse "white" tree blossoms in the fourth line are the white-out of losing consciousness after being struck by an explosive weapon. Robins that "wear feathery fire" in the fifth line are the wartime image of soldiers set ablaze by flamethrowers, an ancient weapon modernized for World War I. Finally, the carefree robins whistling on "a low fence-wire" in the sixth line replaces the wartime image of infantrymen entangled in barbed wire on a battlefield. Influences Teasdale's point of view in "There Will Come Soft Rains" that the universe has no caring interest in the existence or any actions of human beings developed from her readings of the works of Charles Darwin, which began in earnest in 1913. The same principle applies to all of the other living things mentioned in the poem. Thus, given that swallows, frogs, and robins must kill other creatures to feed themselves, the serenity in