Emily Dickinson’s 1865 poem A narrow Fellow in the Grass conforms to the fear of deceit. The imagery is used to introduce fear or anxiety through a snake. It starts with a skinny man that travels through the Grass. The author takes the readers into the poetic lifeline of exploration of fearing the unknown. Whenever an individual fears the unknown, they are prone to fall victim to deception. The encounter with a snake describes the orientation of deception because they are unpredictable. In the poem, the snake appears and disappears without rooting any warning. The author uses this nature of environmental changes to bring the nature of anxiety and fear. The poem analytically revolves around the realism of fear versus the idealism of deceit, which symbolizes nature and humanity.
The author personifies the snake by calling it a fellow, which gives the snake a weird humanistic quality. When it is called a fellow, it means that the snake has thoughts that can materialize into intentions (line 1). The sense of menace seems archetypical. It sums up the presumed encounter that the author supports the idea that there is a bigger problem than the basic analogy of snakes being scary. The symbolic nature of the serpent is fear and deceit, which many people can use in their contexts. Ancient snake symbolism, such as in the Garden of Eden, is trickery or deceiver.
The speaker uses flashbacks to relate to his childhood encounter with the snake. According to the speaker, he was fooled into touching a snake (line 12). The snake’s power to disguise itself frightens everyone into conforming to its deceits. For instance, the author flashbacks into his childhood memory when he believed the snake was a Whip Lash, He bent to pick, but the snake wrinkled and disappeared (line 13). The aspect of fear comes when the snake does not bite the speaker, but it disguises and vanishes. Fear puts uneasy anticipation that makes an individual unsure about what is about to happen.
The poem revolves around welcoming and violent, friendly and menacing, strange and familiar. The speaker’s reaction toward the snake shows that it is a normal reaction in the natural world. Humans are part of the world as animals, and the poem’s subject conforms to the reality of life and death. For instance, in the first stanza, the speaker uses the snake in personification by treating it as a civilized member. There is a connection between the humanistic world and animal nature. The encounter between the speaker and the snake shows vulnerability when he posits that he met the snake while he was a boy. He was barefoot during that time, making him defenseless to the natural world. The spectrum analogy also insinuates that people and nature have a connection that can turn out to be a danger if taken for granted.
The last stanza marks the snake as an unknown threat lurking in the peaceful kingdom. According to the poet, transport/ Of Cordiality refers to the shares of kinship amongst animals. The language used juxtaposes the snake’s treacherous image, showing harmony within the Garden of Eden. There is a friendly stance with the snake, and the menace relationship showed by the fact that a snake has bodily power over the author. The idealism of animal relationship with the realism of nature insinuates that humans can separate from the animal world, but they are not immune to the perils of ecology.