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Snippets of “There Will Come Soft Rains” will come to mind when I'm cycling through the heart-stoppingly gorgeous forests of the Oregon mountains; when I'm reading about Arctic ice-melt and dead coral reefs; during the Canadian wildfires that reduced the sun to a smoldering cinder in a brown-yellow sky. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if mankind perished utterly. The poem’s misanthropic chords ring in the mind; yet so too does its oddly quiet, romantic cadences — its suggestion that the world would be more quiet, more still, if humans were fully gone. The poem emerges not just when I'm pondering environmental stuff. Sometimes, Teasdale’s lines will swim into my consciousness when I'm sick with a fever; or when I'm at a funeral; or the other day, when I read about the death of a famous scientist. Which is my point here: A memorized poem becomes part of the fabric of your thought, a tool that your mind constantly uses to make sense of the world. Its cognitive and emotional power derives from the fact that you don’t have to look the poem up. All the lines are there — latent, but available any instant you need them.