Although Emily Dickinson wrote almost 1,800 poems, fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime. ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ is one of the few that Dickinson saw in print. It appeared in the Springfield Republican in 1866, although it was heavily edited and re- named ‘The Snake’. Even now, viewing this poem in its original form, it is easy to see why Dickinson allowed the general public to read it. ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ is not one of the confessional or ‘dark’ poems, which are more typical of her oeuvre (body of work). The speaker in the poem is male, and this, coupled with the biblical allusion and didactic message about how insidious evil is, distanced Dickinson’s own personality and life from the poem. In other words, it was a safe poem to put into the public domain, as it could have been written by anyone, and it does not reveal anything personal about the poet.
The first stanza sets the scene, by telling us of the occasional and unexpected appearance of a snake in the grass. The formal language, while partly informed by Dickinson being a nineteenth-century poet, is also a characteristic feature of her writing. A ‘narrow fellow’ is undoubtedly an effective and unusual way to describe a snake: ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass/ Occasionally rides –’. The expression ‘snake in the grass’ means a treacherous or deceitful person. The speaker says that it is likely the reader has encountered a snake – literal or metaphorical – themselves: ‘You may have met Him – did you not’.
The snake’s appearance is always startling: ‘His notice sudden is –’. He leaves no trace behind: ‘The Grass divides as with a Comb –/ A spotted shaft is seen, –/ And then it closes at your feet/ And opens further on –’. The simile of a comb effectively conveys how the blades of grass part to allow the snake through, just like the teeth of a comb, and then spring back to where they were. This represents the stealthy progress of the devil and the evil he symbolises. As Dickinson’s contemporary Charles Baudelaire once wrote: ‘The finest trick of the devil is to convince you that he does not exist.’
