A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)

The poem dramatizes a paranoiac fear of some aspects of nature—that is, the fear of being deceived or losing control. In the speaker’s eyes, the very body of the snake is constructed to move in a way that instills fear and uncertainty: The snake is undetectable until the very last moment, just prior to a surprise encounter. The speaker’s rationalist side copes with this fear by enlisting the ideals of 19th century scientific observation, collecting data about snake behavior, diurnality, appearance, and habitats. His literary side attempts to bridge the divide between animal and human, painting the snake as a rider and someone adept with combs—similes that try to make its movements closer to those of people. However, the speaker cannot ever fully be at ease when encountering a snake. Instead, seeing one unleashes unfounded, involuntary terror, which makes it clear that he can never dissociate this animal from its biblical cognate, the serpent from the Garden of Eden, who tempted Eve and Adam to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—an action that forced God to expel them from paradise.

The poem thus contains anxiety about the ability to subjugate nature by valuing humanity over the non-human—an idea that undergirded the history of the US. North America was colonized under the pretense that the Christian God had had given this land to European settlers—a conviction that enabled the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans. Later, the designation of Black enslaved people as less than human allowed slavery to thrive. Just before Dickinson wrote this poem, this ongoing institution led to the immense bloodshed of the American Civil War, which brought mass death to Dickinson’s country and her inner circles. The poem is obsessed with the divide between human and not human, between conquerable and unconquered, between subdued and resistant nature.

Dickinson counters her contemporaries’ insistence on associating “wilderness with the evil opponent to Christian civilization” (Thomas J. Lyon, This Incomparable Land: A Guide to American Nature Writing. Milkweed Editions. 2001), rejecting this view as absurd and hyperbolic—though possibly inescapable. Rather than succumbing to puritanical fears, Dickinson’s speaker tries a more experiential and empirical approach to the snake, observing it for its own sake to rid himself of his association of the animal with absolute evil. But the poem’s scientific ambitions end in ambiguity and uncertainty, as the speaker can never fully free himself of superstitious reflexes.