The wind begun to rock the grass
Emily Dickinson
The wind begun to rock the grass With threatening tunes and low,— He flung a menace at the earth, A menace at the sky. The leaves unhooked themselves from trees And started all abroad; The dust did scoop itself like hands And 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.
Of note
In 1883, Thomas Niles of the Boston publisher Roberts Brothers offered to take a manuscript collection of Dickinson's poems. She answered with three poems, this one among them. Roberts Brothers did print it in 1891, as "A Thunder-Storm," five years after her death.
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published 1891 in Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series · Text from Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete, a Project Gutenberg compilation of the 1890, 1891, and 1896 series.
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete
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