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Emily Dickinson Snake

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Emily Dickinson is highly recognized as being one of the best American poets to ever write. Her legacy lives on through her many published poems and some of her poems that I am sure were lost. When reading Dickinson’s work for the first time, some people can interpret her as a stuffy woman who never left the house. But, when you dig deeper into her poems and letters it is revealed that Dickinson was full of whit, sarcasm, and somewhat weird sexual tendencies (weird tendencies for the time period, not so weird in today’s society.) “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” is one of Dickinson’s many great poems. This poem is full of layers of meaning, with every aspect of the poem drawing in the reader’s attention. The strange wording, the dashes, the question …show more content…

In my opinion the snake represents the same thing that it does in the Bible, sin and corruption. In many literary works a snake is represented as sin and I do not think that is any different in this poem. In the Bible the snake is seen as the one who tempts Eve in the Garden of Eden. The devil manifests himself into the shape of a snake which could be the very thing Dickinson was trying to represent through the snake in this poem. Dickinson’s background through church could definitely be a reason that she would portray the snake in that way. The speaker in this poem is also symbolic. The speaker is an important element because right in the middle of the poem is when we learn that the speaker is a man, not a woman. Up until that point I assumed that the speaker was a woman because the poet was a woman. A woman or girl could just as easily come upon the same situation with the snake as the boy does, so why is it important that the speaker is a man? I think throughout the whole poem Dickinson uses a heavy amount of personification for the same reason she let us know in the middle of the poem that the speaker was a male. I think she wanted us to see that not everything is as it appears to be. Throughout the poem we have the confusion of the snake as being a snake or a “Fellow”, the snake being a snake or a whip, and the speaker being one with nature or the snake being a disturbing event. I think Dickinson uses the speaker as another device to remind the reader that just because something looks a certain way in the beginning does not mean it will be the same in the end. The way Dickinson used the setting is another way she tricked the reader into thinking things were one way when they were actually not. In the beginning of the poem the setting is that of an open field, then the reader learns of a boy who is actually the speaker. This completely changes the setting because now the reader is actually in a conversion about the

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