A Day

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 16 lines, 87 words, 1 word in 29 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: sun
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

I'll tell you how the sun rose, —A ribbon at a time.The steeples swam in amethyst,The news like squirrels ran.

The hills untied their bonnets,The bobolinks begun.Then I said softly to myself,"That must have been the sun!"

But how he set, I know not.There seemed a purple stileWhich little yellow boys and girlsWere climbing all the while

Till when they reached the other side,A dominie in grayPut gently up the evening bars,And led the flock away.

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 1752–1772 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 · 16 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-sunrose

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/dickinson-day · popplepoetry.com