A narrow Fellow in the Grass by Emily Dickinson

First published: 1866, as “The Snake”; collected in Poems:Second Series, 1891

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (the title is not Emily Dickinson’s, since she did not title her poems) is a short poem of thirty-two lines divided into five stanzas. The poem begins and ends with two balanced stanzas of four lines each, which surround a central stanza of eight lines. Dickinson’s poems appear to many readers to be written in free verse; the underlying metrical structure of her poetry, however, incorporates the traditional pattern of English hymnody: alternating lines of eight syllables and six syllables. Although Dickinson employs this traditional metrical pattern as a model in her verse, she frequently violates and strains against its conventions.

The poem is written in the first person from the point of view of an adult male (“Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—/ I”). The poem thus uses the voice of a persona—a speaker other than the poet—who initiates a cordial relationship with the audience, addressing the reader directly: “You may have met Him—did you not.”

The poem is structured to relate the speaker’s experience in encountering nature, specifically in the form of a snake. The speaker begins by characterizing the snake in friendly, civilized terms: The snake is a “Fellow” who “rides” in the grass, a familiar presence that even the reader has encountered. Again, in the second stanza, the snake appears to act in a civilized manner as it “divides” the grass “as with a comb.” Despite the snake’s cultured appearance, the first two stanzas introduce the snake’s ability to appear and disappear suddenly.

In the third stanza—the central and longest of the poem—the snake’s actions become increasingly unpredictable and inexplicable. The speaker notes the snake’s preference for “a Boggy Acre,” a place “too cool” even for “Corn,” let alone human beings, then recounts a childhood incident in which he bent down and attempted to “secure” a snake but it escaped him: “It wrinkled, and was gone.” What first appears to be some tool or toy (“a Whip lash”) for the child to use or play with eludes not only human control but also human perception and attainment.

The fourth stanza of the poem finds the speaker abruptly back in the present, asserting—again in the polite language of refined society—his connections with the realm of nature: “Several of Nature’s People/ I know, and they know me.” The speaker insists that his feelings for these inhabitants of nature are ones characterized by “cordiality.” This assertion, however, is contradicted in the final stanza by the speaker’s depiction of the effect on him each time he encounters the snake: chilling terror (“a tighter breathing/ And Zero at the Bone”). What begins as a poem ostensibly about a snake becomes, in this way, a poem about the effect of an encounter with a snake—and perhaps by extension with nature itself—on an individual human being.

Forms and Devices

One of the most important poetic devices at work in the poem is the tone: the speaker’s attitude toward the subject being described, the snake. The tone is deceptively simple and light, referring to the snake as a “Fellow.” As the speaker introduces the reader to the snake in the same way that one might introduce an acquaintance, he constructs a metaphor, a way of talking about the snake as if it were a jaunty “Fellow” who “rides” about, a friendly sort whom one surely has “met” in the course of ordinary, everyday life.

The effect of this light, off-handed tone together with the matter-of-fact narration and the metaphorical construction of the snake as an ordinary, civilized “Fellow” is to lead the reader into a situation in which he or she can be taken off guard just as the speaker is unnerved by his encounter with the snake. Indeed, immediately following the initial three-line, polite introduction to the snake, Dickinson jars the reader with one of her characteristic transformations of language: “You may have met Him—did you not/ His notice sudden is.” At first glance, one reads these lines as a question followed by a statement about the snake’s abrupt appearance: it gives “sudden notice.” Dickinson herself insisted, however, that the third and fourth lines of this first stanza were to be read as one statement. Reading as Dickinson intended, then, the verb “is” becomes transformed into a noun with “sudden” as its adjective, and when the speaker apparently asks the reader, “Did you not notice his sudden is?” he assaults the reader’s sense of ease and familiarity with language just as the snake has assaulted his sense of being at home in nature. This wrenching of language from its ordinary functions and the emphasis on the poem as an experience for the reader rather than as a preached message are two important characteristics of Dickinson’s poetic technique which make her one of the first modern poets.

The progression of metaphors and images which the speaker constructs to describe the snake reflects the speaker’s attempts to deal with his encounters with the snake. Beginning as a civilized “Fellow” who neatly divides the grass “as with a Comb,” the snake, by the end of the second stanza and the beginning of the third, has become a “spotted shaft.” The speaker relates that this ominously threatening object—far from being a civilized companion—prefers to reside in “a Boggy Acre,” a place which resists human cultivation.

The narration in the central stanza of a childhood encounter completes the transformation of the snake from the personified “Fellow” to an object. Now the snake is perceived to be first a “Whip lash” and then some ungraspable “it” which engages in a game of hide-and-seek with the speaker.

At the beginning of the fifth stanza, the speaker retreats to his personification of nature’s inhabitants, asserting knowledge of and connections with “Nature’s People” and the “cordiality” he feels for them. The sixth and final stanza, however, contrasts his sense of ease in nature with his feelings of terror upon meeting the snake: “tighter breathing/ And Zero at the Bone.”

Even as the repeated s sounds and the serpentine long and short line lengths in the poem’s opening seven lines usher the reader into an encounter with the snake, so the varied o sounds of the central stanza—boggy, floor, too, cool, corn, boy, barefoot, noon, gone—give way to the full force of the repeated o rhymes which arrive at the end of the poem, blow by blow, with the horror of the snake: fellow, alone, zero, bone.

Bibliography

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Carruth, Hayden. “Emily Dickinson’s Unexpectedness.” Ironwood 14 (1986): 51-57.

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