18 pages • 36 minutes read
Emily DickinsonA narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Snake as Devil and Grass as Eden
In Paradise Lost, John Milton’s interpretation of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the serpent—which Milton, following Christian tradition, identifies with Satan—is infamously a seductive, possibly heroic, figure. This epic was incredibly influential on Dickinson’s literary milieu: Mount Holyoke graduates like Dickinson were “expected to leave with as thorough a knowledge of Paradise Lost as […] the King James Bible” (R. McClure Smith, The Seductions of Emily Dickinson. U of Alabama Press, 1997. Page 26); barring that, Dickinson would have absorbed Milton “through Emerson, Melville, the Brontës, the Brownings, Georgoe Eliot” (Eleanor Heginbotham, “‘Paradise Fictitious’: Dickinson’s Milton.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.1, 1998).
In “A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096),” the narrow serpent performs a microcosmic rendering of the Edenic Fall. The speaker’s first experience with the snake moves from the blissful ignorance of paradise to the mortal realm of fear and trembling: At first, his feet are “Barefoot” (Line 11), unclothed like Adam and Eve; later, he cannot see a snake without having a panic attack. The poem mirrors this journey from unawareness to knowledge for the reader with its riddle-like avoidance of the word “snake,” which the reader must infer from the signifier “narrow Fellow” that slithers away (Line 1). The reader is shaken out of Edenic comfort (not knowing is peaceful) to the postlapsarian terror of knowing that snakes are as unavoidable as our fear of them, no matter how enlightened about other animals we might take ourselves to be. The speaker can never be comfortable with snakes because of the socially constructed narratives that associate the creature with evil—a flaw Dickinson sees as all too human.
Light
The poem’s speaker is surprised several times by the idea that snakes are diurnal—unlike their biblical counterpart, which exists in the darkness of Hell, the actual animals move around in the daytime and, as cold-blooded reptiles, bask in the sun. As a boy, the speaker was traumatized when he saw a snake in the light of day; later, he was similarly shocked to discover that what he thoughts was an unraveling rope in the sunlight was actually a curled up snake. Sunlight is strongly linked to the Christian notion of God’s love as light, so the speaker could never have imagined a snake partaking of this sacred light and the image fills him with cognitive dissonance.
By putting her snake in the light, the poem neutralizes the light/dark binary of biblical tradition; snakes in nature do not echo their literary forebears. Rather than bringing the baggage of centuries of tradition, culture, and bias, the poem argues, people observing nature should reflect on an animal they encounter and attempt to empathize with it—a radical act that allows human beings to spread cordiality to all of “Nature’s People” (Line 18) without giving in to destructive theologies.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
