A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)

The opening stanza has a cordial, friendly tone. A male speaker draws the reader in by creating an intimate conversational space. The speaker asks the reader about the first’s line’s “narrow fellow”: “You may have met him? Did you not” (Line 3). This puts readers on the spot, but while they are formulating an answer, enjambment hurries them onto the next line of the poem (enjambment is a poetic line that doesn’t end in punctuated stop). The speaker isn’t waiting for an answer but instead interjects that whether the reader met the narrow fellow, certainly the reader hasn’t escaped the narrow fellow’s “notice,” which is “instant” (Line 4).

The poem gradually personifies the snake. Already a “Fellow,” the snake now “Occasionally rides,” as though it were on horseback (Lines 1-2). “Rides” gets an internal rhyme in the following stanza with “Grass divides as with a Comb” (Line 5). This rhyme offers musicality and emphasizes the human qualities of the snake, who “divides” the grass as though making a part in hair. The word is rife with other meanings, pointing out the “divide” between the humanness and animalism, a line the snake straddles as it “closes at your Feet / And opens further on—” (Lines 7-8).

In the third stanza, the speaker offers a traumatic childhood memory. When he was a boy, naïveté prompted him to assume that snakes only live in “a Boggy Acre” and “A floor too cool for Corn,” so he need not worry about seeing the creature during the day (Lines 9-10). This story is a warning: Mistakes about snake habitats are a common misconception, and readers should remember that snakes, like humans, can appear at any time of day: For instance, the speaker has encountered snakes “more than once at Noon” (Line 12). The anecdotal nature of the warning adds to the cordial tone established in the first stanza; it is like a party acquaintance sharing a mildly embarrassing story.

The personal revelations about the speaker’s previous experiences with snakes continue in the fourth stanza. One time, he mistook a snake for a “Whip Lash / Unbraiding” (Lines 13-14). A whiplash is a whipping rope, comprised of tightly bound twine. This misidentification was short-lived: As soon as the speaker reached for it, the rope came to life and quickly disappeared—an unexpected revelation in that it was a snake is basking in the sun (Lines 15-16).

In the final stanzas, the earlier divide between human and animal completely disappears—except for one important difference. The speaker refers to animals as “Nature’s People” (Line 17) and describes his fellow-feeling with them as a “transport / Of Cordiality” (Line 20); the speaker does not see most animals in the wilderness as being materially different from humans. However, snakes are a major exception to this. Even though the speaker now knows about more about the snake’s identity, visual presentation, diurnal habits, and preferred habitats, he believes it to be a different category of being. Alone or in company, the speaker still feels anxious upon seeing a snake: His chest tightens and he breathes heavily as fear gets beneath his skin, seemingly dropping his temperature to “Zero at the Bone” (Line 24). The emphasis on bone signifies a connection between fear and death. Seeing the serpent slither reminds the speaker of the physicality of death, of rotting away until he is nothing but a skeleton—a morbid vision highlighted by the rhyming of “alone” and “bone” (Lines 22, 24).