I taste a liquor never brewed

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 16 lines, 83 words, 1 word in 21 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: summer, sun
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

I taste a liquor never brewed,From tankards scooped in pearl;Not all the vats upon the RhineYield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,And debauchee of dew,Reeling, through endless summer days,From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken beeOut of the foxglove's door,When butterflies renounce their drams,I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,And saints to windows run,To see the little tipplerLeaning against the sun!

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 645–663 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-liquor

Send the whole hand-out

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Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/dickinson-i-taste-a-liquor-never-brewed · popplepoetry.com