A narrow Fellow in the Grass

(1865)

This is one of 10 Dickinson poems published during her lifetime. Scholars speculate that Susan gave a copy of the poem to the Springfield Daily Republican, in which newspaper the poem first appeared on February 14, 1866, titled “The Snake.” Dickinson herself was sufficiently irritated by editorial alterations of the poem to express her dissatisfaction to Higginson in a March 17, 1866, letter. There she tells Higginson that the poem “was robbed of me, ” that she was unhappy about the imposition of a question mark at the end of line 3 (where she had no punctuation), and she reaffirms her resistance to print publication: “I had told you I did not print”. With these words Dickinson expresses both her deliberate avoidance of print publication and her unhappiness with editorial interventions in her poems.

A central reason for this poem’s popularity is its immediate accessibility. In an easy-to-follow narrative the poem presents a male speaker who recollects his boyhood encounters with snakes, repeatedly asserting the sense of surprise and excitement that attended these confrontations. An intriguing feature of the poem is the fact that the speaker carefully frames four different meetings with snakes, two that are set in the past and characterized by mostly abstract language and two that are richly detailed and place the encounters in the present. The first is directed to a second person “You”: “You may have met him? ”. The second reference quickly follows this one, shifts from past to present tense, provides abundant imagery, and places the snake very close to the “You”: “Grass divides... / A spotted Shaft is seen, / And then it closes at your Feet”. The third encounter remains in the present tense, shifts from second to first person, provides even more concrete detail, and describes an experience the speaker has repeated several times: “I more than once at Noon / Have passed I thought a Whip Lash”. The concluding two stanzas shift from present back to past tense and place the now-generalized experience of meeting snakes in the larger context of all natural creatures the speaker has come to know: “Several of Nature’s People”. When the final two lines describe “a tighter Breathing / And Zero at the Bone – ”, the distance between past and present suddenly collapses, capturing the unexpected and startling appearance of the snake that has characterized all four meetings while also conveying the impression that the speaker is somehow haunted by these encounters. Interpretations of the poem account for the movement into and out of the present tense and explain the speaker’s apparent fascination with snakes.