Emily Dickinson

Beclouded

BECLOUDED.

mean clouds

**Mean** as in petty or stingy—clouds that won't commit to real weather. Dickinson personifies nature as small-minded.

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

Debates if it will go

A single snowflake **debates**—Dickinson gives it consciousness and indecision. The weather can't make up its mind.

complains all day

The wind is **complaining** like a petulant person nursing a grudge. Nature reduced to whining.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

Without her diadem

**Diadem** = crown. Nature caught undressed, lacking her usual majesty. The whole poem builds to this admission.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Dickinson's Undignified Nature

Most 19th-century nature poetry treated the natural world as sublime—vast, powerful, spiritually uplifting. Dickinson does the opposite. Her nature is petty, indecisive, and complainy. The clouds are "mean" (stingy, small-minded), a single snowflake "debates" where to land, and the wind whines about mistreatment. This is nature having a bad day.

The final couplet delivers the insight: "Nature, like us, is sometimes caught / Without her diadem." A diadem is a crown—the symbol of dignity and authority. Dickinson admits that nature isn't always majestic. Sometimes it's just gray, indecisive weather. The poem humanizes nature by making it as unglamorous as people on their worst days.

Notice how the poem scales down as it goes. It starts with sky and clouds (big), narrows to a single snowflake, then to a "narrow wind," before the final philosophical turn. Dickinson moves from landscape to confession—this isn't really about weather, it's about those days when nothing, not even nature, can muster its usual grandeur.

The Grammar of Indecision

Watch how Dickinson uses verbs of hesitation: the snowflake "debates," the wind "complains." Nothing in this poem acts—everything whines or wavers. Even the title "Beclouded" suggests obscured judgment, not just cloudy skies.

The meter wobbles too. Dickinson typically works in hymn meter, but here the rhythm feels deliberately uncertain, matching the indecisive weather. The snowflake going "Across a barn or through a rut" gives us two prepositional phrases that feel like the flake trying different options.

CONTEXT Dickinson rarely left her Amherst home, especially in later years. Her nature observations came from her window and garden—intimate, domestic nature, not wilderness. This poem feels like watching disappointing weather from inside, where even the outdoors can't deliver today.