An awful tempest mashed the air

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 12 lines, 69 words, 1 word in 69 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: rain, wind
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

An awful tempest mashed the air,The clouds were gaunt and few;A black, as of a spectre's cloak,Hid heaven and earth from view.

The creatures chuckled on the roofsAnd whistled in the air,And shook their fists and gnashed their teeth.And swung their frenzied hair.

The morning lit, the birds arose;The monster's faded eyesTurned slowly to his native coast,And peace was Paradise!

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 5242–5255 of Project Gutenberg ebook #12242. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 12 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#di-tempest

Send the whole hand-out

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Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/dickinson-an-awful-tempest-mashed-the-air · popplepoetry.com