“There Will Come Soft Rains There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pool singing at night,And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;Robins will wear their feathery fireWhistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor treeIf mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

“Spring came slowly to the Bronx with a lot of rain & soft water-color tree blossoms.”

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

“His own eyes were soft and dreamy, cloudy as a trout pool in the rain.”

“Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me"Last nightthe rainspoke to meslowly, saying,what joyto come fallingout of the brisk cloud,to be happy againin a new wayon the earth!That’s what it saidas it dropped,smelling of iron,and vanishedlike a dream of the oceaninto the branchesand the grass below.Then it was over.The sky cleared.I was standingunder a tree.The tree was a treewith happy leaves,and I was myself,and there were stars in the skythat were also themselvesat the moment,at which momentmy right handwas holding my left handwhich was holding the treewhich was filled with starsand the soft rain—imagine! imagine!the wild and wondrous journeysstill to be ours.”

“There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird. Kumiko gave it the name. We didn't know what it was really called or what it looked like, but that didn't bother the wind-up bird. Every day it would come to the stand of trees in our neighborhood and wind the spring of our quiet little world.”