Summer's Armies

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 24 lines, 123 words, 1 word in 10 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 7–8. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: summer, sun
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

Some rainbow coming from the fair!Some vision of the world CashmereI confidently see!Or else a peacock's purple train,Feather by feather, on the plainFritters itself away!

The dreamy butterflies bestir,Lethargic pools resume the whirOf last year's sundered tune.From some old fortress on the sunBaronial bees march, one by one,In murmuring platoon!

The robins stand as thick to-dayAs flakes of snow stood yesterday,On fence and roof and twig.The orchis binds her feather onFor her old lover, Don the Sun,Revisiting the bog!

Without commander, countless, still,The regiment of wood and hillIn bright detachment stand.Behold! Whose multitudes are these?The children of whose turbaned seas,Or what Circassian land?

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 1388–1414 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 · 24 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-armies

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-summers-armies · popplepoetry.com