The Wind

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 21 lines, 111 words, 1 word in 16 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 5–6. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: wind
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

Of all the sounds despatched abroad,There's not a charge to meLike that old measure in the boughs,That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a handWhose fingers brush the sky,Then quiver down, with tufts of tunePermitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,And thrum upon the door,And birds take places overhead,To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,If such an outcast be,He never heard that fleshless chantRise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of soundOn deserts, in the sky,Had broken rank,Then knit, and passedIn seamless company.

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 1796–1820 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 · 21 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-windsounds

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-wind · popplepoetry.com