Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today is January 14th, 2020. The poem that I'm going to read today is by an old friend,

Emily Dickinson, American poet who lived from 1830 to 1886. She has a really lovely winter poem

that I wanted to read to you today. It is called The Sky is Low, The Clouds Are Mean. And you

might recall that many of Emily Dickinson's poems are just titled by their first line, and this

one is no different. So this is how it goes. The sky is low, The clouds are mean.

A traveling flake of snow across a barn or through a rut debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day how someone treated him.

Nature, like us, is sometimes caught without her diadem. This is such a delightful, short, seemingly simple poem with so many just great images.

If you don't know, a diadem is a crown, essentially, a jeweled crown. I suppose

could be maybe not a crown technically, like a headband or something, but something that someone

would wear who is a king or a queen or a sovereign of some kind. And I love how she kind of

plays with all these different images leading up to

the word diadem. So the sky is low, dash, the clouds are mean. So we probably think of right

away that mean means, you know, not generous, not nice, unkind, something like that. But it also could be the idea of

something that is shabby or not very nice in the sense, not in the sense that it's unkind,

but in the sense that it doesn't have a lot of value, financial value, things like that.

And then on the other hand, a third meaning could be,

the third meaning of the word mean, could be what I'm saying there, the idea of it has a

signification. It signifies something. So we start with that image. Then we get a traveling

flake of snow that is going across a barn or through a rut, and it's debating if it will go.

But then we get a dash.

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