The sky is low, the clouds are mean

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 8 lines, 45 words, 1 word in 15 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 5–6. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: rain, winter
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,A travelling flake of snowAcross a barn or through a rutDebates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all dayHow some one treated him;Nature, like us, is sometimes caughtWithout her diadem.

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 1913–1921 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 · 8 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-lowsky

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-sky-is-low-the-clouds-are-mean · popplepoetry.com