A Narrow Fellow Analytical Essay
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 i
The speaker is telling the story though a child's point of view, though actually it is an adult male looking back on his experience as a child. Although the poem's speaker claims to be a lover of nature, it seems that the snake, while fascinating, is impossible to love. Chances are he knows of you before you know of him. That's how in-depth Dickinson is as a writer. I think the mood of the poem is one of mystery and surprise. The double "o" sound is used to convey the sound of whispering wind. This is describing the trail left by the snake's path through the tall grass. She has several uses of language to convey the impression of a snake moving ("It wrinkled, and was gone--") and of her own chill on seeing the snake ("Zero at the Bone"). Line six reads: "A spotted shaft is seen" obviously a purposeful use of assonance to make the reader hear the hiss of the snake and the rustling noise it makes as it moves. The word "barefoot" makes the speaker seem even more vulnerable to the serpent's potential threat. She claims to love nature so much but it's obviously biased. I came to this conclusion after reading between the lines and while doing so, the mellow mood and tone of the voice also aided in pushing me towards this idea. I think Nature's people is referring to the other creatures or animals with whom the boy in the poem likes to play. Where as the snake might have chased after an adult whose time of death had come, it runs away from the child who is only beginning to live.
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