There's a certain slant of light

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 16 lines, 75 words, 1 word in 8 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 7–8. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: sun, winter
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

There's a certain slant of light,On winter afternoons,That oppresses, like the weightOf cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;We can find no scar,But internal differenceWhere the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,'T is the seal, despair, —An imperial afflictionSent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,Shadows hold their breath;When it goes, 't is like the distanceOn the look of death.

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 1957–1975 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-slant

Send the whole hand-out

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Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/dickinson-theres-a-certain-slant-of-light · popplepoetry.com