“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost (1920)

As a striking alternative to Teasdale’s gentle apocalypticism and her reassurance that nature will persist, Frost’s wry verse—with its casual indifference to the prospect of humanity’s annihilation—represents the ironic and dark vision typical of the Modernists. In the poem, Frost accepts apocalypse with a grim shrug, either hate (fire) or greed (ice) will bring on the end. This is not so much an anti-war poem as an anti-everything poem—a position more in line with the Modernists than with Teasdale’s sense of the enduring benediction of nature.

“Spring in War-Time” by Sara Teasdale (1917)

Written at the same time as “There Will Come Soft Rains,” this poem offers the darker side of Teasdale’s complicated optimism. This poem is more a lamentation directly anatomizing the impact of WWI. Unlike “There Will Come,” this poem is set in war-time. Here, the world at war seems to triumph. The world is engulfed in the grief caused by the insanity and brutality of conflict. The poet wonders whether spring will ever return, how the sun can bear to rise to reveal the horrors of the battlefield, and how grass can find the strength to cover the careless toss of battlefield casualties.