The wind begun to rock the grass

Emily Dickinson

Teacher card

Published: 1890, in Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
Length: 20 lines, 114 words, 1 word in 38 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: rain, summer, wind
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

The wind begun to rock the grassWith threatening tunes and low, —He flung a menace at the earth,A menace at the sky.

The leaves unhooked themselves from treesAnd started all abroad;The dust did scoop itself like handsAnd throw away the road.

The wagons quickened on the streets,The thunder hurried slow;The lightning showed a yellow beak,And then a livid claw.

The birds put up the bars to nests,The cattle fled to barns;There came one drop of giant rain,And then, as if the hands

That held the dams had parted hold,The waters wrecked the sky,But overlooked my father's house,Just quartering a tree.

Emily Dickinson (died 1886), Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete (1890), lines 5611–5634 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 · 20 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-wind

Send the whole hand-out

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Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/dickinson-wind-begun-to-rock-the-grass · popplepoetry.com