Emily Dickinson wrote over 1700 poems in her lifetime. The universal themes of many of her poems were pain, separation, love, death and nature. For Dickinson, nature is a source of joy and beauty, which can without warning and without obvious cause become threatening, dangerous. Nature, for Dickinson, is connected with death or with annihilation. Another key feature of Dickinson's poems is her lack of punctuation. Many of her poems are punctuated with dashes that makes the relationship between words in her poems unclear or ambiguous. The particular poem I am analyzing is a poem demonstrating Dickinson's love of nature. But as you will see, this love of nature is also coupled with a pounding fear.
             "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" is believed to have been written in 1865. A year later, it was published anonymously under the title "The Snake" in a journal called the Springfield Republican. It tells of the sometimes unreasonable fear humans have for lesser creatures. The "fellow" that Emily talks about and describes is a snake in the grass. The snake has always been thought of as a sly and devious animal as well as one of nature's most infamous creatures.
             The poem opens up with a somewhat surprise encounter of the snake in the first stanza. The fourth line tells how a snake's senses are very keen, sharp, and sudden.
             Chances are he knows of you before you know of him. The stanza and the third line in particular provides what in my opinion is a familiar scene enough for most readers to recognize. The word choice in the first line gives a false first impression that the snake is harmless. The word "rides" makes it seem as if the snake is more of an elegant creature rather than saying it slithers, which would make the creature less attractive. Like many first stanzas, it is just an introduction and transition into the body of the poem where most of the action and t...