🇺🇸 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”

An extra special homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for this Memorial Day weekend.

For an excellent homeschool exercise in imagination, give your students just the text of this poem, with no context, and see if they can figure out what kind of place Dickinson is describing. (Try the custom print button at the bottom of the page to make a clean copy.)

After a hundred years
Nobody knows the Place
Agony that enacted there
Motionless as Peace

Weeds triumphant ranged
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone Orthography
Of the Elder Dead

Winds of Summer Fields
Recollect the way —
Instinct picking up the Key
Dropped by memory —

Could they see it? Can you?

What other wonderful words have you and your students examined in your homeschool this Leo Term?

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Emily Dickinson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. ✒️

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year, and add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week. 📫

❡ Homeschool calendars: We have a whole collection of free, printable, educational homeschool calendars and planners available on our main River Houses calendar page. They will help you create a light and easy structure for your homeschool year. Give them a try today! 🗓

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❡ Join us! The aim of the River Houses project is to create a network of friendly local homeschool support groups — local chapters that we call “Houses.” Our first at-large chapter, Headwaters House, is now forming and is open to homeschoolers everywhere. Find out how to become one of our founding members on the Headwaters House membership page. 🏡