The snake’s natural habitat is cool and damp environments: ‘He likes a Boggy Acre –/ A Floor too cool for Corn –’. Similarly, we often assume evil is only found in certain places – particular areas of cities or countries – but this is not the case. The devil can be cunning and can assume different forms. Here, the snake appears to be an unravelling whiplash (the flexible part of a whip): ‘Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot –/ I more than once at Noon/ Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash/ Unbraiding in the Sun’. The boy bends to re-tie it, but the snake slithers away: ‘When stooping to secure it/ It wrinkled, and was gone –’. The verb ‘wrinkled’ perfectly describes the undulating (wave-like) motion of the snake’s body.
The speaker wants us to know that he is not one of those people who is frightened by nature and its creatures. In fact, he is very fond of animals and a mutual trust exists between them: ‘Several of Nature’s People/ I know, and they know me –/ I feel for them a transport/ Of cordiality –’. It is just the snake, and all it represents, that he cannot bear. Whenever he encounters the snake it is always an unpleasant shock: ‘But never met this Fellow/ Attended or alone/ Without a tighter Breathing/ And Zero at the Bone –’. The poem can be read on a superficial or deeper level, and resembles a parable due to its message about the presence of evil. There is a darkness in this poem, a sense of foreboding which suggests someone ill at ease and convinced of the presence of evil. Therefore, although Dickinson assumes another persona here, it is, like all her poems, still deeply revelatory of her character.
