The Full Text of “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean”
1The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean.
2A Travelling Flake of Snow
3Across a Barn or through a Rut
4Debates if it will go —
5A Narrow Wind complains all Day
6How some one treated him
7Nature, like Us is sometimes caught
8Without her Diadem.
The Full Text of “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean”
1The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean.
2A Travelling Flake of Snow
3Across a Barn or through a Rut
4Debates if it will go —
5A Narrow Wind complains all Day
6How some one treated him
7Nature, like Us is sometimes caught
8Without her Diadem.
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Introduction
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In this short poem, a speaker gazes gloomily at a chilly, gray winter's day, which looks just about as dismal as the speaker seems to feel. That's not so unusual, the speaker reflects, with a touch of tongue-in-cheek wit: both people and nature have their lousy moods as well as their good ones. Like most of Emily Dickinson's poetry, "The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean" was never published during Dickinson's lifetime; it first appeared in a posthumous collection, Poems (1890).
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Summary
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The sky is heavy and grey, and the clouds are petty and stingy. A single wandering snowflake can't seem to decide whether it's going to travel past the barn or through the mud. All day long, the thin wind whines about how somebody hurt his feelings. Nature, just like us humans, sometimes misplaces the elegant crown she wears when she's at her best.
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Themes
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Nature, Humanity, and Mood
Gazing out at a gloomy winter day, the speaker of “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” observes that the weather seems grumpy—just as grumpy as the speaker, in fact. As sullen and sulky as any person, the weather mirrors the speaker’s own displeasure at being stuck inside on a dull, cold afternoon. Nature, the speaker wryly reflects, has its off days just as any person does, and people can often see their own feelings reflected in the world around them. Perhaps people can thus take comfort in the fact that the weather, like one’s mood, always changes eventually.
Everything the speaker sees on this dreary day seems to be in a rotten mood. The clouds aren’t just grey, but “mean,” or stingy and withholding: they’ve only released one indecisive snowflake, which wanders through the muddy yard as if it can’t decide what to do with itself. And the “Narrow Wind” is whining like someone who feels they’ve been mistreated and just won’t let it go. In other words, to this speaker, nature appears to have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today.
All this personification of nature suggests that it’s really the speaker who’s having a bad day, and who sees their mood reflected in the nasty weather. Even the time the speaker spends tracing the path of a single “Flake of Snow” suggests that they’re staring gloomily out the window, practically dying of boredom and irritation.
But that, the speaker sighs, is just the way things go. When the speaker remarks, tongue in cheek, that both nature and people sometimes seem to have misplaced their “Diadem” (or crown), there’s the sense that nothing in the world can be at its absolute best all the time. But the comical image of the lost crown suggests that, in a certain light, these low moments can be as funny as they are irritating—and that the better moments of life, when they come again, might be fit for a king.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean”
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Line 1
The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean.
This poem begins with a flat, dull description of a flat, dull day. Take a look at the way the speaker uses parallelism to introduce an uninspiring landscape:
The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean.
Those mirrored words ("the ___ is ___") suggest that, everywhere the speaker looks, the world seems so gloomy that there's no point in even varying one's sentence structure to describe it. Everything's just one big samey mass of gray.
Not only is the weather lousy, but it also seems actively unhappy. Personifying the sky as "low" and the clouds as "mean," the speaker suggests that nature itself is in a bad mood, both depressed and sour.
And that bad mood will turn out to be exactly the subject of this poem. It's not just that the weather is bad outside: it's that the speaker's internal weather is "low" and "mean" as the skies. This will be a poem about how the outer world can seem to reflect the inner world.
This flavor of personification was so common in 19th-century poetry that one important artist and critic, John Ruskin, coined a dismissive term for bad versions of it: the "pathetic fallacy," the attribution of human feelings to nature. ("Pathetic" here doesn't mean "pitiful," but "to do with emotion.") Anyone who's seen a movie in which a storm breaks out just as something sad happens to the hero will be familiar with how the pathetic fallacy works. Ruskin (and many thinkers who followed him) disliked this technique because he felt it was often hokey, false, and trite.
But Ruskin would likely have approved of Dickinson's personification here. In this poem, the speaker is well aware that they're projecting their own feelings onto the landscape, and actively reflecting on the human tendency to do so!
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Lines 2-4
A Travelling Flake of Snow
Across a Barn or through a Rut
Debates if it will go — -
Lines 5-6
A Narrow Wind complains all Day
How some one treated him -
Lines 7-8
Nature, like Us is sometimes caught
Without her Diadem.
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Symbols
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Weather
The weather in this poem symbolizes the speaker's mood (and moods in general).
Just like people, the speaker observes, the weather goes through high patches and low ones. In this poem, the weather is decidedly "low": it's a miserable gray day, frosty-cold and muddy. All of this bleakness reflects the speaker's own self-pity, gloom, and boredom.
But if the weather works like moods (and vice versa), then the speaker can take comfort in the idea that the sun will inevitably come out again one day—in both the inner and the outer worlds.
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
Personification (and, more specifically, pathetic fallacy) sits right at the heart of this poem, establishing a relationship between the dreary weather and the speaker's dreary mood.
Everything the speaker sees as they look around at the winter landscape seems to have a personality—and none of those personalities are pleasant. The skies are "low" and "mean," or gloomy and stingy; they've only released a single snowflake, which doesn't seem to know what to do with itself, dithering about what path to take across a muddy barnyard.
The wind is even worse: all it can do, all day long, is gripe about being mistreated somehow. Its "narrow," whining voice reflects its narrow focus on its own concerns.
And that might give readers a clue about how the speaker is seeing nature, here. It's not just that the skies are low and the clouds are mean and the wind is whiny: it's that the speaker feels low, mean, and whiny as they look out at this dismal day.
The speaker makes a connection between mood and weather explicit in the poem's last lines:
Nature, like Us is sometimes caught
Without her Diadem.Nature, this poem's personification suggests, is indeed "like Us" a lot of the time—not just because both nature and people have good "weather" and bad, but because people read the world in the light of their own moods.
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Imagery
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Parallelism
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Consonance
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Assonance
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"The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Mean
- Rut
- Diadem
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Here, "mean" doesn't mean "unkind," but "stingy, withholding, and sparse."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean”
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Form
This poem is built from a single eight-line stanza, or octave. But it also breaks down into two four-line stanzas, or quatrains, one of Dickinson's favorite forms. (In fact, some editions print this poem as two quatrains rather than one octave.) The kind of quatrains here are more specifically ballad stanzas, because they follow an ABCB rhyme scheme and alternate between eight and six syllables per line.
However one breaks its shape down, this poem is short, a quick snapshot of a dreary day. That shortness reflects the speaker's gloomy mood; it's as if the speaker can barely raise their head from the windowsill even to say how gross it is outside.
But the poem's brevity also helps its dry humor to shine. After six lines of bad weather, the final two lines, in which the speaker reflects that even "Nature" sometimes loses her shining "Diadem," land like the payoff of a joke.
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Meter
Like much of Dickinson's poetry, "The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean" uses common meter, also sometimes known as ballad meter. That means that it switches back and forth between lines of iambic tetrameter—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—and lines of iambic trimeter, or three iambs.
Here's how that sounds in lines 3-4:
Across | a Barn | or through | a Rut
Debates | if it | will go —This is a down-to-earth, folky meter, one that appears everywhere from hymns to nursery rhymes. Here, it unobtrusively harmonizes with the poem's mood: it's an ordinary meter to describe a dull, sulky day.
But the poem also plays with this meter a little. Take a look at what happens in lines 7-8:
Nature, | like Us | is some- | times caught
Without | her Di- | adem.The first foot here isn't an iamb, but its opposite: a trochee, which has a DUM-da rhythm. That strong first stress changes the tone of these concluding lines a little. After all those lines that plod along with the same rhythm describing the grey day, the speaker finally seems to heave a resigned sigh here, as if to say: "Never mind, this is just the way things are sometimes."
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean" uses one of Dickinson's favorite rhyme schemes. It runs like this:
ABCB
Like the poem's common meter, this rhyme scheme is an old reliable: it shows up in all kinds of down-to-earth folk poetry, like nursery rhymes and ballads. Such unobtrusive rhymes fit right in with this poem's tone, reflecting the speaker's dull mood on a dull day.
But there's some internal rhyme and slant rhyme here to spice things up, too. For instance, the internal rhyme between "low" and "Snow" in lines 1-2 means that a long assonant /oh/ sound drags out all through those first lines, like a heavy sigh.
And the slant rhyme between "him" and "Diadem" in lines 6 and 8 closes the poem on a note of slight mismatch—an out-of-sorts rhyme to match an out-of-sorts day. That slant rhyme also gives the unusual word "Diadem"—which already stands out in a poem that's mostly about mud and grey skies and complaints—a little extra sparkle.
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Speaker
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The reader never learns anything too specific about the speaker of "The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean." All that the reader knows about this speaker is that they're having a pretty gloomy day, staring out at the frosty, muddy yard and feeling as if the whole world is sulking with them.
But this speaker also has a sense of humor. When the speaker ruefully concludes that both "Nature" and humanity sometimes fall short of their absolute best, their image of a lost "Diadem" of pleasure and happiness strikes a comical contrast with the grey picture they've painted.
And even though that "Diadem" is jokey, it also hints that the speaker can see the best in things, as well as the worst. On a good day, that "Diadem" suggests, the speaker can feel as if the whole world, inner and outer, is bejeweled and sparkling.
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“The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Setting
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"The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean" is set on a gloomy winter's day in a rural town, where the roads around the "barn[yard]" are muddy and "rut[ted]." There's not even a good solid snowstorm to break up the tedium: the "mean" skies will only release a single bewildered flake.
This setting is both literal and metaphorical: the dull cold day outside the speaker's window perfectly matches the speaker's own feelings. Perhaps the speaker's mood and the weather even reflect back and forth on each other: the weather makes the speaker gloomy, and the speaker's gloom makes the weather look even gloomier!
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an utterly original poetic voice. Her distinctive style and psychological acuity set her apart, not just from other 19th-century poets, but almost from the 19th century itself: many critics see her more as a forerunner of 20th-century Modernism.
But Dickinson's interest in the way that humanity interacts with the natural world also shows all the marks of American Romanticism. Influenced by earlier English Romantic writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dickinson adopted both their ballad meter and their subject matter, often writing about nature's power, danger, wisdom, and beauty. Here, of course, Dickinson takes a look at the other side of the humanity/nature coin, examining the way that nature can show people a sullen face as well as a sublime one.
That sense of humor and humility fits right in with the contemporary American Romantic movement, too: like Walt Whitman, Dickinson could write poetry that ranged from the self-deprecating to the deeply spiritual (sometimes in the same poem).
But Dickinson always took her art form seriously, even when she was using it to poke fun at human foibles. In a letter to her good friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she defined poetry like this: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”
Historical Context
While she's become one of the world's most famous, influential, and beloved poets, Dickinson was unknown during her own lifetime. She lived quietly in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published only a handful of poems, anonymously. She was famously reclusive and shy; in the last years of her short life she rarely left the family home she shared with her parents and her sister Lavinia. It was only after Dickinson's death that Lavinia discovered the vast treasure-trove of poems that Dickinson had squirreled away in her bedroom.
Within the tight confines of her home, Dickinson led a huge life. A lot of her poems—like this one—are set in the ordinary rural world around her, but use that everyday terrain as a leaping-off point for profound insights into humanity and the divine.
In one sense, then, Dickinson was cut off from a wildly eventful period of American history: she lived during the Civil War years and saw huge political change and chaos without ever writing much about it directly. In another sense, though, she had her finger on the world's pulse: her innovative work would one day revolutionize American poetry.
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More “The Sky is low — the Clouds are mean” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem in Dickinson's Hand — See the poem in Dickinson's own handwriting at the Emily Dickinson Archive.
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Dickinson at the Poetry Foundation — Read a short biography of Dickinson and find links to more of her poems.
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A Photo of Dickinson — See a rare photo of Dickinson and learn more about how she's remembered.
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The Emily Dickinson Museum — Visit the Emily Dickinson Museum's website to learn more about Dickinson's life and works.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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