Emily Dickinson

A Thunder-Storm

THE wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low,—

Gendered storm

The wind is "He"—Dickinson personifies the storm as male throughout. Watch how this gender assignment shapes the violence.

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

Hands motif begins

First appearance of hands imagery. The dust "scoops itself like hands"—this prepares for the crucial "hands / That held the dams" later.

And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets,

Oxymoron

"Hurried slow"—a deliberate contradiction. Thunder's sound travels slower than lightning, so it seems to lag behind the flash.

The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.

Predator storm

Lightning becomes a bird of prey with "yellow beak" and "livid claw." Livid means both bruise-colored and furious—double meaning.

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,

Personal detail

Rare autobiographical moment. The storm "overlooked" (passed over, like Passover) her father's house but damaged one tree—specific memory.

But overlooked my father's house,
Just quartering a tree.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Dickinson's Grammar of Violence

Dickinson uses active verbs for inanimate objects to make the storm feel alive and intentional. The wind doesn't blow—it "flung a menace." Leaves don't fall—they "unhooked themselves" and "started all abroad" like travelers. The dust doesn't swirl—it "did scoop itself like hands." Every object becomes an actor.

This isn't just personification for decoration. The grammar removes human agency from the scene. Notice who's doing what: wind rocks, leaves unhook, dust scoops, wagons quicken (themselves), thunder hurries, lightning shows, birds put up bars, cattle flee, waters wreck. Humans appear only once—"my father's house"—and they're passive, merely overlooked.

The "hands" image does double work. First the dust scoops "like hands" (simile). Then "the hands / That held the dams" (metaphor for divine power). Dickinson moves from comparing something to hands, to invoking the actual hands of God. The casual simile becomes theological.

What "Overlooked" Means

The final stanza shifts to biblical language. "Overlooked my father's house" echoes Exodus 12, where God "passed over" the marked houses during the final plague. The storm-as-God's-wrath reads the landscape and spares one building.

"Just quartering a tree" is the poem's only admission of damage, and it's weirdly precise. Quarter means to cut into four parts—butchering language. The tree gets the violence meant for the house. One tree takes the hit, like a sacrifice or substitute.

This was likely a real storm Dickinson witnessed. She rarely mentions her father directly in poems, so "my father's house" (not "our house" or "my house") is significant. The poem moves from cosmic drama to one specific address, from mythic flood to one quartered tree.