Sara Teasdale imagines a spring scene full of gentle, thriving life: soft rains, the smell of wet earth, swallows circling, frogs singing in pools, wild plum-trees in tremulous white, robins whistling on a fence wire. Everything is lovely and self-contained. Then the poem turns: none of these creatures will know or care about the war, and none would mind if mankind perished utterly. Spring herself, waking at dawn, would scarcely notice we were gone.
The mood is peaceful but quietly chilling. The beauty of nature is shown to be entirely indifferent to human suffering and even to human extinction. The speaker seems to be looking past the war to a healed, oblivious world that would continue without us. That contrast between the lush imagery and the thought of humanity disappearing gives the poem its calm, mournful undercurrent.