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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The opening stanza has a cordial, friendly tone. A male speaker draws the reader in by creating an intimate conversational space. The speaker asks the reader about the first’s line’s “narrow fellow”: “You may have met him? Did you not” (Line 3). This puts readers on the spot, but while they are formulating an answer, enjambment hurries them onto the next line of the poem (enjambment is a poetic line that doesn’t end in punctuated stop). The speaker isn’t waiting for an answer but instead interjects that whether the reader met the narrow fellow, certainly the reader hasn’t escaped the narrow fellow’s “notice,” which is “instant” (Line 4).
The poem gradually personifies the snake. Already a “Fellow,” the snake now “Occasionally rides,” as though it were on horseback (Lines 1-2). “Rides” gets an internal rhyme in the following stanza with “Grass divides as with a Comb” (Line 5). This rhyme offers musicality and emphasizes the human qualities of the snake, who “divides” the grass as though making a part in hair. The word is rife with other meanings, pointing out the “divide” between the humanness and animalism, a line the snake straddles as it “closes at your Feet / And opens further on—” (Lines 7-8).
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson